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      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

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      ‘Better martyrs’: the growing role of women in the far-right movement

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      Researchers who track how the far right in the US mobilizes, self-promotes and recruits are reporting that women are playing a growing role in the movement.They often work behind the scenes to advance conspiracy theories through social media and softly attract new women into the fold. But at the same time, in recent years “alt-right” women have also shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics.They have taken prominent roles in events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol, count US congresswomen in their number and have seen the emergence of powerful new groups like Moms for Liberty.“[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” said Dr Sandra Jeppesen, a professor of media and communications at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.Despite their seemingly understated presence in extremist groups and far-right politics, they can be effective organizers, responsible for bringing thousands of people to the Capitol for the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and now mobilizing against inclusive education.Some women figures on the far-right scene have a lot of money, especially the most prominent ones, said Tracy Llanera, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. The most high-profile far-right conservative women are involved in social media production because they fit the mold of what Llanera calls “the acceptable faces of conservative propaganda”.They include Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren and Canadian far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern, who produce conservative media and rightwing propaganda, amassing a huge following and millions of dollars.Even so-called “Tradwives” – such as the TikToker Estee Williams, who promotes strict adherence to traditional gender roles – generate income from their social media content. The Global Network on Extremism & Technology recently linked Tradwives to “alt-lite” and “alt-right” ideologies.“I think women definitely want power,” Jeppesen argued. “I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”Like men in the movement, women commit to far-right politics believing there is a crisis and they have to commit to extraordinary action, she stated. In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump.The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol, Jeppesen explained.While Greene’s social media presence attracted insurrectionists to Washington DC, the far-right election-denial group Women for America First ultimately held the permit for the rally outside the White House, helped to coordinate the march that became the January 6 riot, and eventually organized fundraisers for election audits in Georgia and Arizona in 2021, Vice News reported.Other female insurrectionists played a pivotal role in the riots and spreading election denial conspiracies during and after.Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keepers member and founder of the Ohio State Regular Militia, arranged for both militias to travel to the Capitol, organizing and communicating on site with the encrypted walkie-talkie-style app Zello. She was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison; people such as Watkins are considered political prisoners to members of the far-right movement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Ashli Babbit was killed by Capitol Hill police during the January 6 attack, she was promoted as a martyr, with even the former US president Donald Trump calling her parents. “Women make better martyrs in the ‘alt-right’,” Jeppesen said about Babbit’s lingering effect.Another growing power on the far right is Moms for Liberty, a group that began as a small parents’ rights group but which has spread across the US and is a leading force in promoting book bans.The group – with a fervent membership of conservative mothers – aims to affect US education, attacking anything that meddles with the far-right view of what is suitable for bringing up children, said Llanera of the University of Connecticut. “Mothers protect their offspring, out of the private sphere where they are most relevant,” she added.Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University and researcher at Lakehead University, explained that rightwing sects will use a broad appeal to a general issue like children’s safety in order to spread far-right ideas.“Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?” Ulthiin said.Far-right mothers start building rapport with other parents, using the vulnerability of their children to open the door to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment.The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the “mommy blogger aesthetic” on Instagram, known for sharing photos of “lovely, enviable lives”, become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories.Most notably, film-maker Sean Donnelly produced an eight-minute documentary, QAmom: Confronting My Mom’s Conspiracy Theories, about his mother’s transformation from a new age Californian to an outright conspiracy theorist who believed well-known celebrities would be arrested for pedophilia.Ulthiin said that women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles. “It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult,” they said. More

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      How a Trump adviser manipulates free speech to advance his causes and ‘hurt his adversaries’

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      Towards the end of July Leonard Leo, architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary, emerged from his vacation retreat in Maine to write an opinion piece for the local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, headlined: “When is free speech protected?”Leo, 58, is the low-profile, deceptively nondescript co-chair of the conservative legal group Federalist Society. That he turned his hand to this topic was in itself no surprise – he has long presented himself as a champion of the first amendment, with its guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, press and peaceable assembly.“Free speech is essential for a free society,” he wrote. “As such, it is something that I have defended and will continue to defend, and I have always accepted that there will be objections and opposition to the work I do.”But a couple of eye-catching, and seemingly incongruous, events have led to speculation that his commitment to free speech might be more complicated than he professes, and more self serving. If all American citizens are equal in front of this vital element of the US constitution, could it be that some people – notably Leo himself – are more equal than others?The first of the two events took place in the bailiwick of the Bangor Daily News, in Maine, where Leo has a $3m waterfront estate on an elite island community in Northeast Harbor. On 20 July, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported on a new lawsuit that had been brought by a 23-year-old local resident for wrongful arrest.Eli Durand-McDonnell, a landscaper, was part of a group of progressive activists who staged a series of peaceful protests outside Leo’s home. They were angry about his role in securing a rightwing supermajority on the US supreme court, and the evisceration of fundamental rights that flowed from that.Leo had proposed to Donald Trump the names of all three of the justices appointed by the former president: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. As such, he played a critical role in the court’s overturning of the right to an abortion in June 2022.Leo isn’t named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit, which accuses two local police officers of making an illegal and retaliatory arrest of Durand-McDonnell during one of the protests on 31 July 2022, a month after the devastating abortion ruling. But it does claim that the arrest was made “at the direct behest of Leo, a powerful and wealthy conservative political activist who has used millions of dollars as political speech to influence American politics and courts”.The complaint discloses that the head of Leo’s private security detail contacted the Bar Harbor police while one of the protests was occurring outside his home, singling out Durand-McDonnell for supposedly harassing the Federalist Society chief and his family. Leo told a police officer who turned up at the scene: “I think it’s time for us to press some charges,” adding, “I really feel like this is a guy who’s got to be in jail someday, and sooner rather than later.”In his Bangor Daily News op-ed, Leo said that before the protest Durand-McDonnell had yelled at his wife and daughter that they should burn in hell. “I don’t take reporting someone to the police lightly. But, as a husband and a father, neither can I take harassment of my wife and children lightly,” he wrote.Durand-McDonnell saw the event differently. He denies harassing anyone, insisting that all his actions were political protest that is protected by the first amendment.“I think this case sums it up perfectly,” he told the New Yorker. “The rules don’t apply to Leonard Leo … If he doesn’t agree with what someone else says, it’s no longer free speech.”The second event burst into public view five days after Mayer’s New Yorker article. On 25 July, Leo wrote a letter through his lawyer to two leading Democratic US senators on the judiciary committee, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse.The senators wanted Leo to answer a series of questions about his ties to the supreme court justices as part of an ethics investigation they were conducting. Leo has long been a figure of interest for Congress, given his outsized influence on US politics and the courts.He is credited as being both brains and brawn behind the long campaign to steer the federal judiciary sharply to the right. He helped place at least 200 judges on the federal bench, and then went on to transform the nation’s most powerful court.“Leo has been the central driving figure of the conservative movement’s decades-long effort to reshape the supreme court’s composition and outcomes,” said Alex Aronson, a judicial accountability advocate and Whitehouse’s former chief counsel in the US senate. “He has his fingerprints on every one of the six Republican-appointed justices who are now on the court.”Leo has also become a focus of intense public scrutiny after he was handed a $1.6bn fund to spend on boosting conservative causes. He now controls a pot of money that represents possibly the largest single donation to a political non-profit in US history.Leo’s name has repeatedly popped up in the wave of ethics scandals that has washed over the supreme court this year. In April, when ProPublica published its blockbuster expose of Justice Clarence Thomas’s chummy relations with the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, there was Leo depicted in a painting that hangs at Crow’s luxury lakeside resort in upstate New York sitting alongside Crow and Thomas in amicable conversation.A month later the Washington Post revealed that Leo had arranged for Thomas’s wife, the pro-Trump extremist Ginni Thomas, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed the polling firm that supplied the cash.A month after that, ProPublica unleashed another blockbuster that disclosed the luxury fishing trip in Alaska that Justice Samuel Alito went on in 2008 bankrolled by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. There was Leo again, pictured with Singer and Alito holding king salmon they had caught.Leo, who assisted Alito in his 2006 confirmation to the supreme court, had a hand in arranging the trip. That included asking Singer for seats on his private jet which the justice failed to disclose as he was legally required to do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the wake of these ethically dubious bombshells, Durbin and Whitehouse decided to conduct their own inquiry as part of congressional oversight. They wanted to know from Leo further details of the Alaska fishing trip and what transportation, lodging and gifts he had provided to any of the justices.In his response, Leo turned once more to the first amendment. This time, though, he made the opposite argument: unlike the Maine protester who he said had no free speech right to harass him, Leo said he had an absolute first amendment right that protected his dealings and communications with Alito and the other justices.“Mr Leo is entitled by the First Amendment to engage in public advocacy, associate with others who share his views, and express opinions on important matters of public concern,” his lawyer wrote. Leo declined to cooperate with Congress.One of the striking aspects of Leo’s use of the first amendment in these two events is that in both instances he sets himself up as the victim of harassment. In Maine, he was “harassed” by Durand-McDonnell who in Leo’s view went beyond civil speech and therefore forfeited his first amendment protections.In the letter to Congress, Leo presents himself as being “harassed” by the senators for exercising his first amendment rights to interact with the supreme court justices in any way they liked.This glaring duality – the same harassment claim played both ways with the first amendment – has caught the attention of Leo’s critics. “He’s a free speech champion when it means forcing his radical agenda on everyday Americans and refusing to cooperate with Congress,” said Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the government corruption watchdog Accountable.US. “But he does an about-face as soon as the free speech is directed at him.”The Guardian reached out to Leo to invite his reaction to this criticism, but he did not respond.Aronson called the arguments laid out in Leo’s letter refusing to cooperate with Congress “comically absurd”. “What Leo argued here is that Congress lacks authority to investigate the supreme court. That position has no basis in the constitution or in any precedent.”Aronson said that this was nothing new: Leo and the network of dark money groups he coordinates, along with the conservative justices of the supreme court he helped into power, have long massaged the first amendment for political gain. “The first amendment has been a particular target of political manipulation by Leo and the conservative legal movement across a range of subjects,” he said.In 2010 the supreme court ruling Citizens United used free speech as a way to open the door to massive spending in elections by corporate donors. Then in 2021, in a much less noticed ruling, Americans for Prosperity v Bonta, the rightwing justices effectively created a new first amendment right to keep the identity of big donors secret.In the judicial term that ended in June, the six conservative justices again turned to the first amendment – this time to unleash open discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities in the name of protected speech. In a dissent, Sonia Sotomayor warned that business services could now be denied any vulnerable group, such as interracial couples or parents with disabled children, all in the name of “free speech”.Now, in the latest iteration of the use of the argument by the right, Trump himself is leaning on a free speech defense in response to this week’s indictment over his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.Stand back from all this, and Aronson believes we are witnessing the unfolding of Leo’s judicial revolution. “Highly influential political actors are developing incomparable sway over the judiciary after decades of coordinated investment,” he said.“The law is becoming manipulable to advance their ends. And hurt their adversaries.” More

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      ‘Criminal liability for librarians’: the fight against US rightwing book bans

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      In the classic comedy Blackadder, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger demanded “tougher sentences for geography teachers”. So much for satire. In the real world, US Republican politicians are now seeking “criminal liability for librarians”.To Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Democracy Forward, as absurd as rightwing book bans can seem (a Florida claim that the Arthur books can “damage the souls” of children a particularly florid example), this is no laughing matter at all.She says: “In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill into law that would have done a number of things, including creating the potential of criminal liability for librarians.”The law, Act 372, would make it a misdemeanor offense, punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500, for librarians and booksellers to furnish minors with materials deemed “harmful” by authorities. The law also provides for challenges to materials in public libraries.Last Saturday, two days before the bill was to become law, a federal judge blocked it, as a violation of free speech rights under the first amendment to the US constitution.The judge, Timothy L Brooks, quoted Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Feelings are running high.Arkansas is set to appeal. It will face organised opposition. Democracy Forward is part of a broad coalition including the Arkansas Library Association, the Central Arkansas Library System, community bookstores, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and individual library users.For Perryman, such work is only beginning.“What we know is that laws like the one in Arkansas are part of a national effort from anti-democratic forces, movements and people that do not represent the vast majority of the American people, or even the vast majority of people in states like Arkansas, that are seeking to sow culture wars in order to undermine democracy.“In Arkansas, we blocked that law with a broad coalition of booksellers, librarians and community members, and I think that’s really important in terms of understanding what’s happening in these communities. We are seeing people who do not typically go to court, who do not typically resort to the legal process, really mobilising.”Attempted book bans in libraries and public schools have proliferated in Republican states, complaints made on grounds of history, race, gender, LGBTQ+ rights and more. Attempts to ban titles by high-profile authors (Maya Angelou, Amanda Gorman, Art Spiegelman) have attracted national headlines. The phenomenon has perhaps been most visible in Florida, under a governor, Ron DeSantis, running for the Republican presidential nomination, and with “grass roots” groups such as Moms for Liberty sprouting and shouting loud.Perryman points to sources of fertiliser for such rapid growth.“We have seen a real effort on the part of anti-democratic and far-right actors like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, like [Governor] Greg Abbott in Texas, like legislatures that have developed this [policy]. We have seen a real effort from those sort of lawmakers to develop strategies that are responsive to a very vocal but small minority of people.“The far right has been strategic about trying to organize groups such as Moms for Liberty, formed to provide an appearance that there is an organic movement sprouting across the country, that people are really concerned about children being able to access books, about freedom of expression and what’s being taught in schools.“And what we see time and again is that those voices do not represent a majority of people, and that they are part of a network that is coordinated to try to create issues, in order to be able to roll back progress and roll back our basic freedoms, including the freedom to read and the ability of communities to thrive.“In order to combat that, we have to understand what we’re up against. And so what we have done at Democracy Forward is not only work with on-the-ground communities seeking resources to fight back, who need legal representation … but also to really look and monitor what is happening at the local and state levels throughout the country. And who is behind those efforts.”Democracy Forward was founded after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, by “a dedicated and spirited group” who wanted to take the fight back to the right. Before her current role, Perryman was chief legal officer and general counsel of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, working to “enhance access and equity in healthcare”.She now links book bans to assaults on other civil liberties including access to abortion, a right three Trump appointees to the US supreme court helped remove last year.“If you would have lived a few years ago in the United States, what you would see was laws popping up around the country where there were criminal penalties for doctors for doing their job.“Rightwing actors that were highly coordinated and resourced pushed the law further and further, in order to be able to play in friendly jurisdictions and ultimately they did what they sought to achieve, which was to overturn a constitutional right to access reproductive healthcare through abortion.”Now, Perryman says, “in the censorship space, it is very important to understand that this is a similar playbook.“When you have political movements that do not represent the majority of people … you have to assume that their desire is to fundamentally alter our democracy and to fundamentally alter our first amendment, our ability to express ourselves, the ability of children to be able to get good education and ideas and materials.“And so we take this very seriously, because this is a movement in this country that is a threat to democracy and we will do everything we can to push back.” More

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      The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

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      Welcome to the 2020s, the beginning of what history books might one day describe as the digital middle ages. Let’s briefly travel back to 2017. I remember sitting in various government buildings briefing politicians and civil servants about QAnon, the emerging internet conspiracy movement whose adherents believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites runs a global paedophile network. We joked about the absurdity of it all but no one took the few thousand anonymous true believers seriously.Fast-forward to 2023. Significant portions of the population in liberal democracies consider it possible that global elites drink the blood of children in order to stay young. Recent surveys suggest that around 17% of Americans believe in the QAnon myth. Some 5% of Germans believe ideas related to the anti-democratic Reichsbürger movement, which asserts that the German Reich continues to exist and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. Up to a third of Britons believe that powerful figures in Hollywood, government and the media are secretly engaged in child trafficking. Is humanity on the return journey from enlightenment to the dark ages?As segments of the public have headed towards extremes, so has our politics. In the US, dozens of congressional candidates, including the successfully elected Lauren Boebert, have been supportive of QAnon. The German far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland is at an all-time high in terms of both its radicalism and its popularity, while Austria’s xenophobic Freedom party is topping the polls. The recent rise to power of far-right parties such as Fratelli d’Italia and the populist Sweden Democrats bolster this trend.I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: because it doesn’t need to. Parts of the Conservative party now cater to audiences that would have voted for the BNP or Ukip in the past. A few years ago, the far-right Britain First claimed that 5,000 of its members had joined the Tory party. Not unlike the Republicans in the US, the Tories have increasingly departed from moderate conservative thinking and lean more and more towards radicalism.In 2020, Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski was asked to apologise for attending the National Conservatism conference in Rome. The event is well known for attracting international far-right figures such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the hard-right US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. This year, an entire delegation of leading Conservatives attended the same conference in London. It might be hard for extreme-right parties to rise to power in Britain, but there is no shortage of routes for extremist ideas to reach Westminster.Language is a key indicator of radicalisation. The words of Conservative politicians speak for themselves: home secretary Suella Braverman referred to migrants arriving in the UK as an “invasion on our southern coast”, while MP Miriam Cates gave a nod to conspiracy theorists when she warned that “children’s souls” were being “destroyed” by cultural Marxism. Using far-right dog whistles such as “invasion” and “cultural Marxism” invites listeners to open a Pandora’s box of conspiracy myths. Research shows that believing in one makes you more susceptible to others.I sometimes wonder what a QAnon briefing to policymakers might look like in a few years. What if the room no longer laughs at the ludicrous myths but instead endorses them? One could certainly imagine this scenario in the US if Donald Trump were to win the next election. In 2019 – before conspiracy myths inspired attacks on the US Capitol, the German Reichstag, the New Zealand parliament and the Brazilian Congress – I warned in a Guardian opinion piece of the threat QAnon would soon pose to democracy. Are we now at a point where it is it too late to stop democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking? If so, do we simply have to accept the “new normal”?There are various ways we can try to prevent and reverse the spread of extremist narratives. For some people who have turned to extremism over the past few years, too little has changed: anger over political inaction on economic inequality is now further fuelled by the exacerbating cost of living crisis. For others, too much has changed: they see themselves as rebels against a takeover by “woke” or “globalist” policies.What they have in common is a sense that the political class no longer takes their wellbeing seriously, and moves to improve social conditions and reduce inequality would go some way towards reducing such grievances. But beyond that, their fears and frustrations have clearly been instrumentalised by extremists, as well as by opportunistic politicians and profit-oriented social media firms. This means that it is essential to expose extremist manipulation tactics, call out politicians when they normalise conspiracy thinking and regulate algorithm design by the big technology companies that still amplify harmful content.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Surveys by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people in liberal democracies have largely lost trust in governments, media and even NGOs but, surprisingly, still trust their employers and workplaces. Companies can play an important role in the fight for democratic values. For example, the Business Council for Democracy tests and develops training courses that firms can offer to employees to help them identify and counter conspiracy myths and targeted disinformation.Young people should be helped to become good digital citizens with rights and responsibilities online, so that they can develop into critical consumers of information. National school curricula should include a new subject at the intersection of psychology and internet studies to help digital natives understand the forces that their parents have struggled to grasp: the psychological processes that drive digital group dynamics, online engagement and the rise of conspiracy thinking.Ultimately, the next generation will vote conspiracy theorists in or out of power. Only they can reverse our journey towards the digital middle ages. Julia Ebner is the author of Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over (Ithaka Press).Further readingHow Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky (Penguin, £10.99)How Civil War Starts by Barbara F Walter (Penguin, £10.99)Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko (Redwood, £16.99) More

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      Weak, small and reckless: how Ron DeSantis, Republican Napoleon, met his Waterloo

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      Ron DeSantis has revealed the next phase of his plan to win the Republican presidential nomination by firing 30% of his campaign staff. He has also dismissed a staffer, Nate Hochman, a prominent conservative writer, for creating a video that features a notorious Nazi symbol. A pro-DeSantis political action committee has used artificial intelligence to generate a video in which Trump’s voice trashes the Republican governor of Iowa. A recent poll showed Trump ahead of DeSantis in Iowa by 27 points.After his campaign declared he was entering his “insurgent” stage as “the underdog”, DeSantis disappeared on a donor-provided private jet, his usual mode of travel. Several billionaire donors, however, previously enamored of DeSantis’s “electability”, gave notice that they are jumping overboard without the lifeboat of another candidate. Rupert Murdoch withdrew his mandate of heaven, not so privately dubbing DeSantis a “loser”. Two DeSantis fundraisers in the exclusive Hamptons were scrapped for lack of interest and a third was poorly attended.To steady his wobbly backers, DeSantis issued a dramatic statement, his first announcement of a potential appointment to indicate the kind of administration he would form as president. His choice, another unsteady presidential aspirant, the anti-vaxxer Democrat Robert F Kennedy Jr, to “sic” on the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Members of RFK Jr’s revered family have vehemently denounced him for propounding the antisemitic canard that Jews possess some sort of genetic immunity to Covid, unlike “Caucasians and Black people”, and for suggesting that the disease was “ethnically targeted”. By floating Kennedy’s name, DeSantis had shown that his idea of national unity begins with a government of all conspiracy theorists, regardless of party label.DeSantis capped his reset with a historic declaration, making him the first presidential candidate since before the civil war explicitly to defend the supposed benefits of slavery. (This includes Strom Thurmond, the senator who ran as a pro-segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948.) Florida’s new academic standards for the teaching of Black history include the claim slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”, a line some critics have likened to John C Calhoun’s description of slavery, in the years immediately before the civil war, as “a positive good”.DeSantis waded into the controversy with his trademark flat spottiness, remarking, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Say what you will about human bondage; at least the enslaved could leverage slavery’s benefits down the line. The closest any political figures, much less any presidential candidates, have come in this century to DeSantis’s strained justification for slavery was the refusal of eight Republican senators in 2005 to sign a formal apology for the Senate’s long “failure to enact anti-lynching legislation”.In the immediate aftermath of DeSantis’s latest antics, Trump led him in various polls by margins ranging from 24% to 43%.“What’s going on?” asked the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “There was a lot of optimism about you running for president early in the year … What happened?”DeSantis nervously laughed.“These are narratives,” he explained. “The media does not want me to be the nominee.”“Narratives” is among DeSantis’s favorite words to assert, without further explanation, how “the corporate media” and “the woke” control politics. The “narratives” are a looming phantom enemy. It would be unfair to accuse DeSantis of grasping Foucault’s post-structuralist ideas about the expression of power through discourse. His clotted and fractured political language is related to abstruse theory the way his rudimentary distortions of history are related to history. But his understanding of political dynamics is even dimmer and more self-defeating.DeSantis’s slot as the No 2 in a Republican field of implausible bit players settles his fate as the chief non-challenger. He is inevitable, so long as his utility lasts, as the guarantor of Trump’s nomination. He is the non-viable alternative, a void who occupies unmovable political space. His function is to stymie every other non-contender, none of whom can dislodge Trump themselves. DeSantis blots out the rest. If Trump is the sun, he’s the lunar eclipse.DeSantis has vaulted into second place at least partly because the only other two notable candidates are despised within their party. The former vice-president Mike Pence will almost certainly be the decisive witness in Trump’s trial on January 6 offenses, testifying in the courtroom, facing Trump sitting at the defendant’s table. Pence has no wiggle room politically, despite his state of denial of how it will end. “Hang Mike Pence!” But, imagining himself as president, Pence did manage to criticize DeSantis for his ideological swerve.“To be clear,” he said, “pro-abortion Democrats like RFK Jr would not even make the list” of his potential appointees.The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, unlike Pence, is utterly without illusions. Christie has an intimate, gritty knowledge of New York, at the nexus of greasy real estate, the mafia and Roy Cohn – the underworld from which Trump emerged. Christie is a former top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. His aunt’s husband’s brother was a ranking member of the Genovese crime family.“He’s never run against somebody from New Jersey who understands what the New York thing is and what he’s all about,” Christie says about Trump.Christie has what the wise-guys would call “motive”, for it was Christie who put Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House chief adviser, in prison.He explained: “If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”In turn, Kushner has waged an unrelenting vendetta. In his own turn, Christie now questions the basis of Kushner’s post-Trump administration fortune.“Jared Kushner, six months after he leaves the White House, gets two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. What was Jared Kushner doing in the Middle East? … He was put there to make those relationships and then he cashed in on those relationship when he left the office.”Kushner’s aunt and uncle, who have a poisonous relationship with Jared and Charles, have maxed out contributions to Christie’s campaign. Unlike DeSantis, Christie does not want to edge out Trump in order to be Trump. He wants to prosecute him, as “a liar and a coward”. The fundamental difference between DeSantis and Christie is between the clueless and the clued-in. Among Republicans, though, Christie is polling at 3%.DeSantis is the only actual contender against Trump, and he’s not a contender. He’s trapped in a hopeless conundrum. Circumstances may be beyond his control, but whatever the circumstances he handles them poorly. Every time DeSantis turns the spotlight on himself, the play goes haywire. Whenever he gets the cue, he always hits the wrong note. Playing himself, he’s playing someone trying to imitate another character. While he can never be more like Trump than Trump, he doesn’t really know who Trump is. Only Christie is willing to make the case that Trump is a criminal sociopath. When Trump received his target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating the January 6 coup, DeSantis repeated standard Republican talking points, calculated to support Trump, that the US justice department is “weaponized” and “criminalizing political differences”. Joining the chorus, DeSantis faded into the indistinguishable background, in an exercise of the party closing ranks. His mealy-mouthed words showed him to be the weak disciple.If he were to echo Christie about Trump as a gangster, DeSantis would stand apart from the partisan pack. But then he would be a copy of Christie and earn the enmity of most of the party. Instead, in his crabbed understanding, he conceives of Trump as solely a mean-spirited rightwinger who can be gotten around by being meaner and more reactionary. The more he tries to move to Trump’s right, however, the more he exposes himself as a literal-minded copycat incapable of arousing the depth of emotional devotion that Trump enjoys.DeSantis diminished himself from the start by chasing Trump’s shadow. There is no rightful succession to a cult of personality, and certainly not with the absence of personality. Being a messiah is a one-at-a-time business. The false messiah who turns out not to be the second coming typically winds up being castigated as a fraudulent betrayer and burned at the stake. Christie presents the only true alternative model, which is to purge both the cult and the personality, to deal with crime and punishment. That herculean task would require expunging most of the Republican party. DeSantis owes his career to the Trump party, not the old defunct Republican party. He has sought to become Trump after Trump, only to have to confront the existence of Trump being Trump. So, DeSantis has reduced himself to a troll.Trolling is not merely one of DeSantis’s characteristics; it’s become his principal one. DeSantis struggles to establish an identity through his culture war on identity politics. Yet he lacks both culture and a distinct identity. His battles are stunts, a series of negative projections, at best an accumulation of fears that do not add up. Suing Disney over its acknowledgment of gay people, banning books, gutting universities, prohibiting abortion, shipping unsuspecting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, and slipping into the curriculum a good word for slavery have only prompted DeSantis to try out another personality larger than himself as a summing up.“We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations,” he has declared. “We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”It is also where its governor stages an unselfconscious satire of Winston Churchill’s defiant speech against the Nazis in which the performer does not recognize his comic absurdity.DeSantis’s inconsistency is his one constancy. On issues, he has an extensive and recurring history of flip-flopping on federal disaster relief, privatizing social security and Medicare, aid to Ukraine, and so forth. But his deeper problem is his failure to connect, which pressures him to flounder and spiral in a never-ending search for a convincing image. His behavior demonstrates a pattern of impatience, anxiety over things not happening exactly as he wishes, his frustration building, insistent that people do as he says, obliviousness to their signals, angering easily, and an impulsive inability to cope with criticism. On a campaign stop in New Hampshire in June, when a reporter asked if he intended to take questions from the audience, he snapped: “What are you talking about? Are you blind? Are you blind?” But it was not the reporter who was tone-deaf.DeSantis’s wife, Casey, a former Jacksonville TV host, is his producer. His first defining ad, in 2018, in his first campaign for governor, depicted him as a good father following the guidance of the great father-figure: Donald Trump. It began with Casey.“Ron loves playing with the kids,” she said. DeSantis played with blocks with his infant son and said, “Build the Wall!” “He reads stories,” said Casey. “Then,” said DeSantis, holding Trump’s The Art of the Deal and his baby on his lap, “Mr Trump said, “You’re fired! I love that part.” “People say Ron is all Trump,” Casey chimed in, “but he is so much more.” DeSantis leant over the crib to see his baby lying in a jumper stenciled, “Make America Great Again.” “Big league, so good,” Ron said.DeSantis was a little-known backbencher and member of the House Freedom Caucus, lagging in the polls, running behind the establishment candidate, the agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam. Suddenly, Trump leaped in to endorse him as a “special person who has done an incredible job”.“My opponent’s running on an endorsement,” Putnam said. “No plan, no vision, no agenda – just an endorsement. Just hanging on to the coattails.”Putnam was correct – and DeSantis won the primary by about 20 points. He barely squeaked by in the general election, defeating his Democratic opponent by 0.4%, a razor-thin margin, but Trump’s endorsement again made the difference. Running on the image of the dutiful Maga dad, DeSantis owed his elevation to his worship of Big Daddy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter DeSantis’s landslide re-election in 2022, preparing his run for the Republican presidential nomination, his wife cast him in a new TV ad as a Tom Cruise-a-like knock-off from the movie Top Gun: Maverick, donning the leather bomber jacket and the Ray-Ban sunglasses to teach the “Top Gov” class.“This is your governor speaking,” he said, to invisible students. “Today’s training exercise, dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”Cut. He walked to a fighter jet marked “Top Gov”.“Don’t accept their narrative … I’ve just disabused you of their narrative.”The whoosh of a jet taking off.In his identity cosplay, DeSantis is the heroic pilot willing and able to take on the enemy. Every element of his alibi for his subsequent nosediving campaign can be found in this video: “Corporate media … their narrative …” His latest excuses imitate his previous, empty scripted self. He’s replicating his facsimiles.A few months later, his wife oversaw production of yet another TV ad in which God was now Ron’s co-pilot. She tweeted it out, under the cover line, “I love you, Ron.” Fortunately, so does God, essentially DeSantis’s executive producer, who was mentioned 10 times within 90 seconds in the black-and-white video.While morning light and rolling waves showed the finger of God, Casey DeSantis’s photograph appeared four times. “And on the eighth day,” the deep voiceover explained, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.” DeSantis stood before an American flag. “God said, ‘I need someone to be strong,’” who can “advocate truth in the midst of hysteria” against “the conventional wisdom” and take “the arrows”.“God said: ‘I need a family man, a man who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his daughter says she wants to do what Dad does.’ So God made a fighter.”In this narrative, DeSantis is more than divinely inspired. He is the chosen one. The will of God is revealed. The Almighty has cast his vote. But the basso profundo voice expressing God’s anointment and the narration itself duplicate in precise tone – and partly word for word – an old routine of the long-ago conservative radio broadcaster and huckster Paul Harvey, a chum of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the FBI director J Edgar Hoover.Harvey’s masterpiece of kitsch, “God Made A Farmer,” ends with a riff.“God said, ‘I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs … who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life ‘doing what Dad does.’ So God made a farmer.”The DeSantis ad is a divine revelation of a reproduction of old-time corn. Plagiarizing the identity from Harvey’s spiel, the salt of the earth is transformed into the holy warrior.DeSantis’s opening act of his campaign was to establish his image as a strongman to displace Trump. His strategy was to belittle and hurt the helpless – Black people, migrants, women, gay people, trans people, academics – targets he wraps up as “the woke”. His antipathy seemed to come naturally. His chief adviser in his Florida kulturkampf has been a prolific conservative activist and would-be scholar, Christopher Rufo, who claimed to have a master’s degree from Harvard. In fact, he attended Harvard Extension School, a separate, “open enrollment” branch. Rufo was another case of an overextended identity. After Rufo advised DeSantis to trash the New College of Florida, a public institution, for its “focus on social justice”, DeSantis installed him as a trustee.DeSantis’s victorious crusades over his vulnerable woke foes led him to lay siege to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The little Napoleon’s attack in Orlando, however, began his downfall. As a ploy, taking on Disney less resembled misleading a bunch of migrants to board a flight to Martha’s Vineyard than marching through the Russian winter. DeSantis had thoughtlessly miscalculated, out of false bravado.The aspiring authoritarian tries to seize absolute authority through contempt for civil authority. But once he stumbled into his quagmire with Disney, one of the largest employers in Florida, DeSantis’s theatrics did not seem so clever in beating the woke and owning the libs. His imitation of Trump’s defiant exploitation for political and personal advantage hit a snag. Against Disney, DeSantis trapped himself into a conflict with a more popular and powerful adversary. His stalling upset his image-building to inflate himself above Trump. He made himself appear weak, small and reckless.When his stunts ceased working to make him seem big, DeSantis’s stature fell to earth. His obvious ploys are increasingly seen, even by his erstwhile donors, as his vain effort to define his identity. His battles with “the woke” are insignificant in comparison with the Deep State Trump conjures to fight. DeSantis is too insubstantial to be attacked at the same level. Trump’s high and low crimes are integral to who he is. DeSantis’s carnival acts are contrived sideshows. Trump has been consistently malicious, malignant, deceptive, cruel, vengeful and selfish. This is the character his followers adore. DeSantis is both cruel and a bad mime of cruelty. His gestures at viciousness in the light of Trump’s vast villainy cast him as a follower seeking to be the leader.Trump knows no limits in committing any offense, personal or legal, while DeSantis is bound and driven by his stringent limitations. He’s a static figure. He launches spectacles of abuse in compensation for his drab and detached personality. They are his substitute to generate an interest he does not have intrinsically. He is seemingly incapable of operating apart from his stunts because of his deficit of being. He fills his vacuum with barbs, insults and cruelties to prove his strength in a strained effort to draw attention away from his nullity. He tries to manufacture authenticity through these forced gestures that rebound to illustrate his artificiality and highlight the inescapability of the all-too real Trump.Trump has sniffed out DeSantis’s weakness, his “no personality”, as Trump has put it. Searching for a demeaning nickname, he tried out “Meatball Ron” before settling on “Ron DeSanctimonious”, inspired by the “God made a fighter” ad. He doesn’t take him seriously as a contender. The trait that rankles him is disloyalty.Trump lifted DeSantis from the dregs of the House Freedom Caucus to be his Florida Man. It was not for any special qualities that DeSantis displayed, other than slavish devotion to Trump. Trump never saw him as a successor. Trump never thinks of successors. Narcissists don’t have successors. They don’t groom anybody to follow in their footsteps. DeSantis attempted to groom himself as if he were groomed by Trump, in order to surpass Trump without disturbing Trump. He was acting out a unique Oedipus simplex. It did not work.“And, now Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games,” Trump tweeted, right after the 2022 midterm elections. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.” Trump recounted in detail how he saved the hapless DeSantis from oblivion during the Republican primary of 2018. “I said, listen Ron, you’re so dead that if Abraham Lincoln and George Washington came back from the dead, and if they put their hands and hearts together and prayed … nothing is going to change. Ron, you are gone.” Trump now refers to him as “very disloyal”.DeSantis’s failed attempts to outflank Trump ideologically on the woke front moved him to a new phase, launching a contest to defeat Trump as a sexual emblem of superior virility. In response, Trump collected gossip, rumors and innuendo. On 20 March, Trump tweeted a photo of DeSantis when he was a high school teacher, at a party with teenaged girls. “Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!)”.DeSantis answered with an ad accusing Trump as “the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate” LGBTQ+ Pride month and felt comfortable around trans people – in contrast to DeSantis, who touted his “draconian” record to “threaten trans existence”. The ad was weirdly filled with fleeting images of young male actors from American Psycho, Troy, Peaky Blinders and The Wolf of Wall Street – as if a glancing view of Brad Pitt proved Trump was weak on woke. Interspersed between shots of Pitt as Achilles in a Greek war helmet were rerun images of “Top Gov” DeSantis in his bomber jacket, playing at being Tom Cruise in Top Gun.But DeSantis’s bizarre effort to nail Trump as a dangerous sexual hypocrite only created puzzlement. Of course Trump is a hypocrite. Trump is also the living embodiment of toxic masculinity, however decayed it may be. He remains the Maga-mega male idol. He has been, after all, found liable for sexual assault, and a judge stated he is a rapist. Trump proclaimed his credo in the infamous Access Hollywood tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” DeSantis neither does “anything” – nor is he a star.Nor is DeSantis in peril from the law, another deficit. With each indictment, Trump’s support rises and solidifies. The indictments prove to true believers he is the true enemy of their enemies. Unindicted, DeSantis cannot out-Trump Trump. DeSantis’s pledge to “Make America Florida” is only a promise that he can transcend being a provincial would-be dictator. Trump has and will always beat him to the subversion of American institutions – and on a far larger scale.In his ad swiping at Trump for being responsible for the gay movement, DeSantis claimed his bona fides by flashing leftwing denunciations of himself. “DeSantis is public enemy No 1”. “DeSantis is evil”. Showing he is hated more than Trump, he hopes, might be the ultimate stunt, the one that makes Trump No 2.DeSantis’s cruelty may be genuine, but he’s a minor fiend, not Satan himself. Abandon all hope. More

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      Into the Bright Sunshine: how Hubert Humphrey joined the civil rights fight

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      Seventy-five years ago this month, at a fractious Philadelphia convention, Hubert Humphrey delivered a famous challenge: “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”In a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, Samuel G Freedman helps explain the influences and experiences that led Humphrey, then a 37-year-old midwestern mayor, to take on segregationists in his own party.Humphrey won passage of a bold civil rights platform, triggering southern delegates to nominate Strom Thurmond as a “Dixiecrat” candidate for president. The same year, Humphrey won a race for Senate from Minnesota, launching a national career that culminated in his nomination for president, and defeat by Richard Nixon, in 1968.Freedman describes how Humphrey, who was born in South Dakota, saw Jim Crow up close as a graduate student at Louisiana State University.“Given the deliberate and scrupulous erasure of Black people from LSU, it required not flagrant bigotry but mere passivity for a white student to accept segregation as something like natural law,” Freedman writes. “Humphrey’s eyes were already too open for such obliviousness.”A sociology professor and German émigré, Rudolf Heberle, had a particularly important role in shaping Humphrey’s outlook. As Freedman recounts: “The Nazis’ regime of murderous extremism came to power, in Heberle’s analysis, not by a coup from the armed fringe but thanks to ‘mass support … from middle layers of society’. Reasonable people were entirely capable of acting in morally unreasonable ways and rationalizing away their actions. Heberle had seen and heard it during his fieldwork.”Heberle was suggesting that “the Jew in Germany was the Black in America”.After LSU, Humphrey returned to Minneapolis, where two locals – one Jewish, one Black – helped stiffen his resolve: Sam Scheiner, an attorney who led the Minnesota Jewish Council, and Cecil Newman, founder of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.“There were people from throughout [Humphrey’s] life who recognized something in him – skills, yes, but something larger, a kind of destiny – more than he recognized it in himself,” Freedman writes. “He was their vessel and their voice, the vessel in which to pour their passion for a more just America and the voice to amplify that passion insistently enough to affect a nation whose soul was very much at stake.”Minneapolis’s track record on race has been in the news again. Last month, the US justice department said the 2020 police murder of George Floyd was part of a “pattern or practice” of excessive force and unlawful discrimination against African Americans.Nearly 80 years earlier, Humphrey tried to combat racism and antisemitism in the city.Minneapolis was infamous for antisemitism. In the 1930s, Freedman points out, a homegrown fascist group, the Silver Legion of America, called for “returning American Blacks to slavery and disenfranchising, segregating and finally sterilizing American Jews”. In 1946, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams, called the city “the capital of antisemites”.After running for mayor in 1943, Humphrey mounted another run in 1945. In the year American soldiers defeated Hitler’s forces in Europe, gangs attacked and robbed Jews in Minneapolis, sometimes yelling “Heil, Hitler!” Local leaders were ineffective. But Humphrey, Freedman writes, “plainly shared the Jewish community’s belief that the problem went way deeper than mere hoodlums. For the first time in Minneapolis’s decades-long history of racism and antisemitism, a political candidate was placing those issues at the center of a campaign.”Humphrey offered a five-point plan, including the creation of an organization to combat bigotry. He won. Two months into his term, he was confronted with the wrongful arrest of two Black women. Newman, the Black newspaper publisher, called Humphrey at home. The mayor ordered the women released and the charges dropped.Later, Humphrey won passage of an anti-discrimination law and established a council on human relations, to investigate discrimination against racial and religious minorities. For his efforts, he faced an assassination attempt and threats from Nazis. But Humphrey turned the city around.“Minneapolis stood as virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally,” Freedman writes.Humphrey used such work as a springboard, championing civil rights for the nation.“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late,” he said at the 1948 convention, adding: “This is the issue of the 20th century.”In a 2010 documentary, Hubert H Humphrey: The Art of the Possible, former president Jimmy Carter, who was 23 when Humphrey spoke in Philadelphia, called the speech “earth-shattering, expressing condemnation of the racial segregation that had been in existence ever since the end of the civil war. And he was the only one that was courageous enough to do so”.When Humphrey got to Washington, he found himself ostracized by southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. As he recalled, “After all, I had been the destroyer of the Democratic party, the enemy of the south. Hubert Humphrey, the [N-word] lover.’ … I never felt so lonesome and so unwanted in all my life as I did in those first few weeks and months.”But he continued to champion equal rights, an effort that culminated, as majority whip, with breaking a southern filibuster to help win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Humphrey became vice-president, to Lyndon Johnson, then ran for president himself. But “for the rest of his life,” Freedman writes, he “kept the tally sheet on which he had marked the senators’ vote on cloture, the procedure that ended the filibuster and brought the bill to its successful enactment.”
      Into the Bright Sunshine is published in the US by Oxford University Press
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of books including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      ‘A deranged ploy’: how Republicans are fueling the disinformation wars

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      A federal judge in Louisiana ruled last week that a wide range of Biden administration officials could not communicate with social media companies about content moderation issues, and in a lengthy opinion described the White House’s outreach to platforms as “almost dystopian” and reminiscent of “an Orwellian ministry of truth”.The ruling, which was delivered by the Trump-appointed judge Terry Doughty, was a significant milestone in a case that Republicans have pushed as proof that the Biden administration is attempting to silence conservative voices. It is also the latest in a wider rightwing campaign to weaken attempts at stopping false information and conspiracy theories from proliferating online, one that has included framing disinformation researchers and their efforts as part of a wide-reaching censorship regime.Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana have sued Biden administration officials, the GOP-controlled House judiciary committee has demanded extensive documents from researchers studying disinformation, and rightwing media has attacked academics and officials who monitor social media platforms. Many of the researchers involved have faced significant harassment, leading to fears of a chilling effect on speaking out against disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election.The Republican pushback against anti-disinformation campaigns has existed for years, alleging that content moderation on major platforms has unfairly targeted conservative voices. Many tech platforms have instituted policies against misinformation or hateful speech that have resulted in content such as election denial, anti-vaccine falsehoods and far-right conspiracy theories being removed – all which tend to skew Republican. But research has found that allegations of anti-conservative bias at social media companies have little empirical evidence, with a 2021 New York University study showing that these platforms’ algorithms instead often work to amplify rightwing content.The rightwing narrative of tech platform censorship persisted, however, intensifying as companies prohibited medical misinformation about Covid-19. It gained additional momentum last year after the Department of Homeland Security rolled out a disinformation governance board aimed at researching ways to stop malicious online influence campaigns and harmful misinformation. Republican politicians and rightwing media immediately seized on the board as proof of a leftist authoritarian plot.Fox News hosts specifically singled out researcher Nina Jankowicz, who was tapped to be the board’s executive director, and ran numerous segments viciously mocking her. A year-long harassment campaign followed, leading to Jankowicz receiving death threats, having deepfake pornography made of her and seeing her personal information released online against her will.The disinformation governance board suspended its operations only a month after its debut, in what Jankowicz told the Guardian earlier this week was the start of a larger rightwing campaign aimed at rolling back checks on disinformation. “They got a win in shutting us down, so why would they stop there?” said Jankowicz, who was originally named in the Louisiana lawsuit but removed on account of no longer being a government official.The GOP takes aim at researchersIn addition to the lawsuit in Louisiana, Republicans have put pressure on researchers through a House select subcommittee investigation that launched in January and claims it will look into the “weaponization of the federal government”. The House judiciary committee chair, Jim Jordan, earlier this year issued a wide-ranging request for information and documents to multiple universities with programs aimed at researching disinformation, and has so far sent dozens of subpoenas.Among the institutions and officials that Jordan requested emails and documents from were the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the non-profit Election Integrity Partnership. Jordan last month threatened Stanford University with legal action if it did not turn over additional records. (Stanford released communications with government officials but did not send some internal records, including ones that involved students, the university told the Washington Post.)The Stanford Internet Observatory, the Center for an Informed Public and the Election Integrity Partnership did not return requests for comment.Democratic representatives decried the committee’s activities as an attempt to harangue researchers and institutions that its members viewed as political enemies, likening it to McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.“This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the Maga extremists who have hijacked the Republican party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense,” Jim McGovern, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, said during the formation of the committee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe committee has struggled to be seen as legitimate, with a Washington Post-ABC News poll released in February showing that a majority of Americans view it as a partisan attempt to score political points. But it has nonetheless put pressure on academic institutions and emboldened attacks against researchers, including the University of Washington disinformation expert Kate Starbird, who told the Washington Post that she has faced political intimidation and cut back on public engagement.Starbird and other researchers are directly named in the Louisiana lawsuit for their role as advisers to a now-disbanded Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency subcommittee on disinformation. Starbird, who did not return a request for comment, has previously stated that the Republican-led lawsuit egregiously misrepresents her work.The Louisiana lawsuitRepublicans filed the lawsuit against Biden last year, and were joined by other plaintiffs that included the conspiracy site the Gateway Pundit and a Louisiana group opposed to vaccine mandates.The case was notably filed in a Louisiana district court where Judge Terry Doughty presides. Doughty, who was appointed by Trump and previously ruled against Biden administration mask and vaccine mandates, is a jurist Republicans specifically seek out when shopping for a favorable forum. He has overseen more multi-state challenges to the Biden administration than any other judge, Bloomberg Law reported, despite previously being a little-known justice based in a small city of less than 50,000 people.Legal experts questioned Doughty’s injunction against the Biden administration this week, the Associated Press reported, saying that the wide scope of the ruling meant that public health officials could be prevented from sharing their expertise. Meanwhile, disinformation researchers have stated that Republican efforts to push back against content moderation and safeguards against misinformation threaten to open the floodgates for conspiracy theories and falsehoods ahead of the 2024 presidential election.Amid the rightwing campaign against content moderation and disinformation researchers, numerous social media platforms have also been peeling back restrictions. Twitter under Elon Musk, who last year engineered the release of some internal communications between Twitter and government officials, has hollowed out its content moderation teams. Meanwhile, YouTube has reversed a policy banning election denialism and Instagram allowed the prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr back on the platform.The Biden administration stated this week that it objected to Doughty’s injunction in the Louisiana case, and would be considering its options. The justice department is seeking to appeal the ruling. More