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    [post_date] => 2020-12-17 19:24:22
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    [post_content] => A Washington, D.C. rally held by pro Trump evangelicals revealed the fascism in their worldview.

Prominent right-wing Christians organized a prayer rally and an affiliated “Jericho March” in Washington, D.C. last Saturday. The ceremonial act, which also took place in a number of state capitals across the U.S., was meant to echo the Biblical story about the Israelites bringing down the walls of Jericho by circling it while blowing trumpets; in its modern iteration, evangelical Trump supporters walked seven times around various government buildings while praying to “bring down the walls of voter fraud” and undo the presidential election results. Although there is no evidence of widespread election irregularities, and the Trump administration’s frivolous lawsuits have been shut down—most recently by the Supreme Court—the rally-goers and marchers believed they were engaging in an act of spiritual warfare that would “reveal” the election had been stolen and prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Michele Bachmann, former Congresswoman from Minnesota and a notorious evangelical conspiracy theorist, said in a video posted on Facebook that this was “a Hebrews 11 moment,” referring to what Christians sometimes call the Bible’s “Faith Chapter,” which recounts the righteous deeds of Biblical heroes.

Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow and a prominent Trump supporter, addressed the D.C. rally, while several other speakers peppered their talks with plugs for his company. The headliner was Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, who was compromised by Russia while in office and whom the president recently pardoned after he was convicted of lying to the FBI. At the rally in Washington, Flynn, who recently called for “limited martial law” to impose a new election, said: “We’re in a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of this country.” And, as might be expected for an event based around the invocation of a trope from what Christians call the Old Testament, the D.C. rally featured shofar blowing and “a prophetic word” from Curt Landry, a so-called “Messianic Jew”—i.e., a Jewish convert to Christianity.

Evangelicals have deservedly received negative press for their efforts to convert Jews; indeed, America’s Christian nationalism goes hand-in-hand with an appropriative Christian Zionism that has profoundly influenced Trump’s foreign policy, not least in his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Mike Pence invited a Messianic “rabbi” to a 2018 campaign rally to mourn the then recent shooting deaths at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue; this was a stunningly tone-deaf insult not only because Jews don’t recognize Christian “rabbis,” but also because most evangelicals subscribe to the belief that Jews who do not convert to Christianity are damned to hell.

The philo-Semitism of Christian nationalism is never very far from anti-Semitism. This is neatly illustrated by the fact that the emcee of the D.C. rally, evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, recently released a racist, conspiracy-mongering “parody” music video about alleged election stealing that depicts four Jewish men—Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Jerry Nadler, and Chuck Schumer—as puppet masters manipulating Biden’s “strings.”

Once a writer for the relatively innocuous evangelical cartoon series “Veggie Tales,” Metaxas has more recently made headlines for writing fascist children’s books like Donald Builds the Wall, and for sucker-punching a protester after a Republican National Convention event. At the opening of Saturday’s rally, he “joked” about someone in the audience taking out a bazooka and shooting down a media helicopter. Metaxas clearly embodies the values and desires of most white evangelicals, but his recent behavior has alienated right-wing Christians invested in respectability. Phil Vischer, the creator of “Veggie Tales,” has rejected Metaxas’s brand of culture warring. And  Rod Dreher, the reactionary editor of The American Conservative and a convert to Orthodox Christianity, referred to Metaxas’s extreme rhetoric in a recent interview with Charlie Kirk—for example, Metaxas said that calls to concede that Biden won the election are “the voice of the Devil”—as “hysterical.”

Since Saturday’s bizarre spectacle in D.C., some of the more prominent “respectable evangelicals” have been trying to distance themselves from both Metaxas and the charismatic excesses of Trump’s most enthusiastic Christian supporters, who are holding out for a “miracle” that will somehow overturn the 2020 presidential election.

For example, Southern Baptist author Beth Moore tweeted that Trumpist Christian nationalism is “not of God.” Similarly, conservative commentator David French called Christian Trumpism “idolatry” and Metaxas’s rhetoric “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.” Of the Jericho marchers, he wrote: “They believe that Trump had a special purpose and a special calling, and that this election defeat is nothing less than a manifestation of a Satanic effort to disrupt God’s plan for this nation.” French added that far from “holding their nose” to vote for Trump, his evangelical base was “deeply, spiritually, and personally invested in his political success.”

I am glad that French has called out this dangerous language and dehumanizing rhetoric, which he correctly identifies as a common precursor to physical violence. But when he writes, “A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic,” I can’t help but focus on that little word “now.” The abusive, authoritarian nature of right-wing Christianity is not new.

How do I know? I could point you to reams of well-sourced writing by myself and others on the topic, but what I want to say here is that my most visceral and primary knowledge comes from the simple fact that I grew up in the trenches of the culture wars that men like David French and Michael Gerson, who also recently criticized Metaxas, helped to build and further. From the time I was five or six years old, I remember the churches my family attended, as well as my Christian school, drilling into our heads at every opportunity that abortion was “murder,” a “literal Holocaust,” and that we needed to do everything we could to stop the “baby-killing” Democrats. I remember being taught through the 1980s and 90s to see our society and current events not just in starkly black and white terms, but as reflections of “spiritual” warfare being fought by the forces of God and the forces of Satan through human agents.

And the God and country Christian nationalism of my childhood was hardly subtle. One of my elementary school’s walls was emblazoned with Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” and our talent shows ended with an audience sing-along of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

Fascism backed by Christians does not emerge ex nihilo. And in our current case, it did not emerge without significant contributions from men like Gerson and French (and women like Moore), along with other “respectable” evangelicals. And until they are willing to take accountability for that, and to discuss explicitly how they might have to examine their theology and rethink its authoritarian components in order to avoid enabling the worst of Christian nationalism in the future, they should not be heralded as heroic for reaching the low bar of opposing violence based on obviously false conspiracy theories.

Religion journalists and political pundits are still far too favorable toward the idea that there is a meaningful rather than superficial ideological gap between “respectable” evangelicals and the types that showed up at the Jericho March.  Remember the reaction to the December 2019 op-ed by Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today? Titled “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” it stirred up a storm of reaction and was covered by legacy media platforms as evidence of a schism within Trump’s evangelical base. For journalists, the temptation to see greater diversity of views within the right-wing, mostly white evangelical establishment than is actually present there can be difficult to avoid. Given the extent to which Christian hegemony influences our society, criticizing the beliefs of any large Christian demographic is still largely taboo. But the truth is that white evangelical subculture, in both its “respectable” and its rabidly pro-Trump varieties, is thoroughly authoritarian; the divisions in play here are much less significant than they may seem.

The real story about respectable evangelicals is that they still want to have their cake and eat it too. They reject loudly the never-say-die Trumpist Christianity that Metaxas has embraced, but they have failed to acknowledge their complicity in the current conservative Christian circus—or to examine the authoritarian nature of their own theology. We should not let them get away with such “cheap grace” by applauding them for enabling the worst of Christian nationalism, only to then shrink from the monster of their own creation. Nor should we read into the current divisions between evangelicals the seeds of any forthcoming substantive internal reform, given that authoritarian evangelical subculture is impervious to any such possibility.
    [post_title] => 'A spiritual battle for hearts and souls': white evangelicals grapple with post-Trump America
    [post_excerpt] => So-called "respectable" evangelicals are distancing themselves from Trumpism, but without accepting responsibility for their ole in creating the Christian circus that brought him to power. 
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‘A spiritual battle for hearts and souls’: white evangelicals grapple with post-Trump America

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_date] => 2020-12-04 07:33:19
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    [post_content] => To break down the structures of racism and oppression, start with an act of radical solidarity: listening. 

A memorial gathering for David Graeber, the activist-anarchist and anthropologist who died unexpectedly in September, was held on October 11 in Berlin. The invitation described it as part of an intergalactic memorial carnival. In memory of Graeber’s activism, the masked attendees shouted “off with their heads!” while gleefully popping balloon heads of Trump, Erdoğan and Bolsonaro, who represented “kings to topple”.

They also chanted against patriarchy, imperialism and racism in the direction of the nearby Humboldt Forum, a controversial project to repurpose the former Prussian Berlin Palace as a museum for ethnographical collections from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Opponents of the project say it perpetuates Germany’s legacy of colonialism with a collection of stolen objects housed in a building that symbolizes European imperialism.

In Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Azoulay, an artist, critical theorist and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, describes the institutionalization of these “kings”, or the manifestations of political, social and economic control through physical violence and cultural erasure, as part of an interconnected system of imperial oppression stretching back to 1492. She proposes the urgent, imaginative task of unlearning these structures.

In many ways, this aim to rethink imperial societal structures is present in the global wave of demonstrations inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests that started in the United States last spring, sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black American, by a white Minneapolis police officer. Black Lives Matter protests have been ongoing since the 2013 founding of the group after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The recent protests, which also build on the decolonial and antiracist efforts against institutions and monuments by groups such as Decolonize This Place, Museum Detox and the Monument Removal Brigade, have triggered a renewed debate on the imperial legacies of Western Europe and the United States, especially the perpetuation of these histories via the institutionalization of material culture.

In June, the King of Belgium responded to a mass Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels by apologizing for his country’s brutal colonial history in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Activists emphasized that this apology was informal, lacked concrete political action and came sixty years too late. In the United States, Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, D.C. toppled a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike after Juneteenth rallies. In September, Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza staged a widely-reported protest with his attempt to take back a nineteenth century African funeral pole that was on exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. In October, London police arrested eighteen-year-old Benjamin Clark for tagging a statue of Winston Churchill with “racist”.

Diyabanza, the Congolese activist, is part of the pan-African Les Marrons Unis Dignes et Courageux, which has enacted similar actions in the Netherlands and southern France. For the Quai Branly intervention in June, he worked with other activists to live-stream the event; in the video he calls for the French government to stop collecting stolen colonial objects. But the judge who presided over his case stated that it should focus only on the specific funerary pole and not the broader context of ongoing colonial reparation efforts. Diyabanza argued that the museum action should not be considered a crime because, “We get our legitimacy from the perpetual idea of trying to recover our heritage and giving our people access to it.”

In Potential Histories Azoulay stresses this idea of legitimacy in which stolen material culture is often used to prop up state, colonial and imperial actors as a basic premise that underlines the (fraudulent) idea of History. While she draws on her scholarship and activism in Israel and Palestine and research on slavery in the United States, Azoulay’s aims to illustrate the international embeddedness of such imperial and colonial structures.

Azoulay’s ongoing critical photographic theory research plays an important role in unpacking this History. She suggests that the “shutter” of photography, which dates back to the late nineteenth century, was a technology that aided imperial conquest. The shutter “acts like a verdict” in that it initiates a linear before and after and results in a document narrating a specific historical vision—i.e., the vision of the (colonial) photographer and the ruling institution that he represents. She describes the use of photography as a means of recording the attempted erasure of native cultures, which were and are territorially separated and ruled. The photograph is a format in which these results were used to create linear historical knowledge, such as how the creation of new borders renders some “undocumented” or “illegal aliens” and some “citizens.” This is upheld by institutions ranging from museums, universities and archives to contemporary formations of nation-based sovereignty and governance.

 

[caption id="attachment_2232" align="alignnone" width="1920"] From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]

Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.

Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.

Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”

“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.

Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.

Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.

 

Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.

After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
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‘Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism’: a review of Ariella Azoulay’s new book

by Rachel Pafe

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    [post_date] => 2020-11-26 17:49:39
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    [post_content] => Part of the Trump campaign's strategy was to feed into the Christian right's martyr complex. 

When it comes to the religious vote in America’s 2020 presidential election, some clearly biased commentators are trying to spin cherry-picked exit poll data into a tale about white evangelical defectors helping former Vice President Joe Biden win. But it was Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank who got it right when he summarized the Trump 2020 phenomenon as largely about white evangelical Christians who “were fired up like no other group by Trump’s encouragement of white supremacy”—versus “everybody else.”

As evidence of his claim, Milbank cites exit poll data that shows white evangelicals, who represent about 15 percent of the U.S. population, comprise about a quarter of the electorate overall—and a full 40 percent of Trump voters. To be sure, majorities of all white Christian demographics voted Trump in 2020 as in 2016; in addition, a very small percentage of Black Christians, and a larger minority of Latinx Christians voted for Trump this year. White evangelicals, however, remain far and away America’s most solidly pro-Trump demographic, and they turned out in droves to support him. And to say that Trump’s white evangelical base is not taking the news of his election loss well would be quite the understatement.

Despite some high-profile Republican leaders and “respectable evangelicals” like Michael Gerson chiding them for a “failure of character,” many of these evangelical Trump supporters have refused, for weeks, to recognize that the election is over. In doing so, they are literally demonizing Democrats and playing up the same old wild persecution fantasies that have long since animated this authoritarian demographic.

On the notoriously reactionary 700 Club, the flagship Christian Broadcasting Network program, 90-year-old host Pat Robertson asserted, “It isn’t over yet,” and called on his audience to pray to overturn the election. “In the name of Jesus, I bind the spirit of delusion that has come over this land,” Robertson prayed, adding, “We will not surrender our nation, we will not give up this great country, and Satan, you cannot have it, in the name of Jesus.” Satan, he suggested, “wants to turn this nation over to socialism.” Robertson declared: “I still think Trump’s ultimately going to win.”

Those who grew up being taught that reality is shaped by “spiritual warfare” will instantly recognize Robertson’s language of “binding demons.” When applied to politics, such thinking is clearly incompatible with democracy. It has also been on prominent display throughout Trump’s presidency in the figure of his spiritual advisor, Paula White, who has also publicly prayed against the “demonic” forces supposedly trying to “hijack the will of God” for the election.

The prominence of neo-Pentecostal and charismatic Christians like White has been building within evangelicalism for decades, as conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture has become, along with the G.O.P., increasingly authoritarian. And it’s not just older evangelicals. While many young people leave evangelicalism, those who opt to stay in the faith even as it has careened into virulent extremism are, if anything, even more hardline than their parents.

Christians like White, Robertson, and their followers are invested in the “prophecies” that many of them have made over the last few years holding that Trump has been “chosen” to pursue God’s will for the United States. Elite celebrity preachers like White and Robertson might be cynically cashing in on the anxieties of rank-and-file believers, but there is no doubt that many evangelicals truly fear a Biden administration will “persecute” them.

According to political scientist Ryan Burge, evangelicals have a “martyr complex.” During the election cycle the Trump campaign explicitly played into this, with Trump casting Biden, a devout Catholic who has vowed to protect both religious freedom and LGBTQ rights, as anti-religious. “Essentially they’re against God if you look at what they’re doing with religion,” Trump said, while his son Eric claimed of his father:

He’s literally saved Christianity. I mean, there’s a full-out war on faith in this country by the other side. The Democratic Party, the far left, has become the party of the atheists, and they want to attack Christianity, they want to close churches. They’re totally fine keeping liquor stores open, but they want to close churches all over the country.

The fantastical message that Christianity is “under attack” matches what evangelicals themselves believe and want to hear. For the majority of them, the definition of “religious freedom” is the power to discriminate against members of other religions and to impose their narrow interpretation of Christianity on those who do not share it, using the coercive force of law. They regard having to coexist with LGBTQ people and provide us with equal accommodation in the public square as “persecution.”

Meanwhile, conspiracy-minded evangelicals frequently indulge in even darker fantasies, imagining their religious practice could actually be banned and that they could be arrested or even executed for practicing their faith by, for example, refusing to solemnize a same-sex marriage. Of course, these scenarios are about as likely to play out in America as a blanket ban on the consumption of apple pie.

Meanwhile, Eric Trump’s false claim that Democrats “want to close churches” is being widely circulated on Twitter. This is a bad faith and deliberately dishonest interpretation of America’s patchwork of county, municipal, and state-level public health requirements limiting the size of social gatherings, often including church services, which have been linked to numerous incidents of mass infection. Along with their reckless insistence that church services should continue as usual—sometimes in the form of lawsuits—prominent evangelicals have turned sensible mask requirements into fodder for the culture wars, using rhetoric that paints them as victims of a supposedly anti-Christian government. Some conservative Christians, including Kanye West, even claim to believe that the coronavirus vaccine, when it becomes available, will confer “the Mark of the Beast” on those who receive it as the Antichrist rises to power.

This reality-averse majoritarian self-victimization is a hallmark of fascism; it will not, unfortunately, simply disappear when President-elect Biden takes office. A dangerous right-wing politics of grievance will continue to shape American political life so long as conservative Christians continue to hold outsize influence and disproportionate power, a situation that is facilitated by the undemocratic Electoral College and equal representation of all states in the Senate, regardless of their population.

As I write this, Trump-supporting evangelicals continue to deny that Biden won the election and to insist that they will never accept the Democratic leader as president. They are also railing against C.D.C. advice that people refrain from attending large Thanksgiving gathering this year because they are likely to further exacerbate the already spiking spread of COVID-19 infections.

On prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel, for example, evangelist Mario Murillo declared, “I will never believe that Joe Biden is the president of the United States.” Invoking the language of spiritual warfare, Murillo called on Christians to “rebuke” the election results and described the role of the church in current events as “supernatural.”

“Our role is to command the strongholds to come down,” Murillo exclaimed, referring to the charismatic Christian notion that demonic “principalities and powers” can be defeated through prayer.

As Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” When far-right Christians like Murillo tell us they will never accept Biden (or, frankly, any Democrat) as the legitimate president of the United States, proponents of democracy need to believe them. People who think their political opponents are literally demonic, and who continue to incite irrational fears of persecution—even as the federal courts, which Trump stacked with right-wing authoritarians, continues to deliver for their culture wars agenda—are not people who can be reasoned or compromised with. Nothing short of total control will ever be enough for them.

How do we deal with that stark reality? It is important to maintain the pressure, no matter the odds of success, for democratic reforms that would limit the power of white evangelicals and other authoritarians. This means pushing for the abolition of the Electoral College; for adding seats to the Supreme Court as a means of restoring fairness after the G.O.P.’s recent power grab; and admitting DC and Puerto Rico as states.

We must also maintain high public awareness of Christian nationalist extremism. Over time, a more realistic national conversation about white churches and Christian nationalism should contribute to the political delegitimization of Christian extremists in the eyes of the public, thus opening up new political possibilities for the future.

Biden, unfortunately, has called for a clearly impossible unity, which means that his administration is unlikely to lead the way here. Still, it seems he is willing to exercise power in the pursuit of justice; that, at least, will help fend off the theocratic threat for the time being.

 
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Why do so many evangelicals continue to deny that Biden won the election?

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_date] => 2020-11-20 04:47:26
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    [post_content] => There’s nothing like a contested election amid a pandemic to make you realize that we are all tied together.

Just weeks after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, my extended family got together to eat our feelings. Nothing about that Thanksgiving felt normal, but we went through the motions and tried to stay positive. Twenty-five of us got together at my dad’s cousin Nancy’s place in Long Island as we always do. We gorged ourselves on turkey and pumpkin pie. We hugged and laughed and drank pinot noir. We watched football. Like many liberals, we grasped for explanations behind the political shift in the Rust Belt, a shift that the polls had failed to capture. I remember how Nancy’s dining room transformed into an impromptu book club meeting for J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which most of us happened to be reading because we all desperately wanted to understand “the other side.” 

Vance’s book, which was published in the summer of 2016, described how an ongoing lack of economic opportunity, coupled with social isolation, has excluded huge swaths of the heartland from the American Dream. It is those “forgotten” men and women—mostly white, working-class and without a college education—who helped lead Trump to victory; at least that was the media’s dominant narrative. An escapee from a blighted town in Ohio who miraculously graduated from Yale Law School, Vance became an unlikely poster child for rural America following Trump’s shocking upset, appearing on cable news to translate his “base” for the rest of the country. Looking back, I can see that Vance’s inspiring personal history was palatable at that moment because it offered an excuse for our racist relatives. They weren’t upholding white supremacy, they were just “economically anxious.” 

Four years later, we understand everything we need to know about the other side. We’ve seen how in addition to the racial resentment, misogyny and xenophobia, Trump gave his followers permission to embrace an ethos of toxic individualism, elevating the notion of “personal choice” above community accountability. As a result, Thanksgiving 2020 is shaking up to be a referendum on exactly how divided—yet simultaneously connected—we are as a nation. While my immediate family hides in our home and rarely interacts with other people, Trump’s base, whether we’re talking about his supporters in the Senate or people attending rallies and protests, appear largely maskless and in packed crowds. A Stanford University study found that Trump rallies led to an estimated 30,000 infections and 700 deaths thus far; the recent “Million MAGA March” protest of Joe Biden’s victory in Washington, D.C. is bound to add to that tally. 

There’s nothing like a contested election amid a pandemic to make you realize that we are all tied together, red and blue, “in a single garment of destiny,” as Martin Luther King Jr. said. Those who flout C.D.C. guidelines out of “personal choice” may indirectly affect those who follow those guidelines to the letter. We need look no further than a rural town in Maine, where a 55-person wedding wound up infecting half the guests and killing seven people who weren’t even invited. 

For my family, this is personal. My husband almost died in March, after contracting a nasty case of COVID-19 on a business trip at a time that the Trump administration was telling us there was absolutely nothing to worry about. After struggling with the lack of testing facilities, I lived through the hell that is not knowing whether my husband would ever come off a ventilator. But one need not have gone through what we did to look at the charts tracking infection rates over the past week and feel a nauseating sense of déjà vu. 

Just in time for the holidays, coronavirus infection rates are soaring in a “third wave”–though, to be fair, the first never really ended–tearing through flyover country and boomeranging back to cities. New restrictions loom on the horizon: more school closures, limits on private gatherings, curfews, another round of lockdowns. Congregating indoors in a spirit of conviviality is akin to aiming “a loaded pistol at grandma’s head,” as Colorado governor Jared Polis described it. Dr. Anthony Fauci said in October that his three children will not be coming home this year for Thanksgiving “because of their concern for me and my age,” which makes sense. Yet as our soon-to-be-former president continues to reject health recommendations and deny reality—about the pandemic, about his defeat in the election, and everything in between—nearly 40 percent of Americans say they are still planning to travel home for a Thanksgiving dinner consisting of 10 or more people.

Not my family. For us, and everyone I know who takes this virus seriously, Thanksgiving this year is most definitely cancelled. My parents are isolating in Florida, and my sister is in Berlin. My mother-in-law is in Arizona, where she may host an outdoor dinner with my brother-in-law’s family, if the weather cooperates. My dad’s cousin Nancy, who together with her husband Steve has hosted our Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember, is giving herself a well-deserved break this year. 

Yet, for many people who continue to believe the COVID-19 threat is overblown, that we are “rounding the turn,” as the outgoing president repeatedly has stated, the holiday is shaping up to be a vast constellation of simultaneous superspreader events. By Christmas, we will start to see the horrifying results of these ill-conceived choices advocated by Trump allies, many of whom are based in flyover country, where the outbreaks are already straining our healthcare system. 

Just look at Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, who tweeted, “Don’t cancel Thanksgiving. Don’t cancel Christmas. Cancel lockdowns,” despite the fact that hospitals in his state are rapidly running out of beds. The Trump administration’s coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas said on Fox News this week that isolation, not the coronavirus, is the biggest threat facing the elderly. He went so far as to urge people to visit their relatives this holiday season, in direct contradiction to every infectious disease specialist’s recommendations. “For many people, this is their final Thanksgiving,” Dr. Atlas said, not realizing that his criminally negligent advice will make that a reality.  

We should bear in mind that it was a plague that wound up bringing the Pilgrims and Indians together at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. Not so much out of friendship or cultural harmony, but out of a desire on the part of the Wampoanoag tribe to avoid annihilation. An infectious disease, likely leptospirosis, is estimated to have killed between 75 and 90 percent of Massachussetts Bay Indians between 1616 and 1619, leading to the decision to make a mutual-defense pact with the nearby Pilgrims, a decision that was followed by exploitation and carnage in subsequent years. The holiday we celebrate today to commemorate a whitewashed history of that first Thanksgiving was designated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to bring the country together amid the horrors of the Civil War. It often feels we are as divided now as we were then. 

A schmaltzy-looking film adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy” is set to debut on Netflix next week, but I won’t be watching it. This holiday season, instead of making excuses for the “other side,” I propose that we reject the myths of the salt-of-the-earth “economically anxious” men and women in America’s heartland just as our views about the myth of Thanksgiving have evolved. My family members are no longer wringing their hands about how to find bridges of communication with Trump supporters, how to reason with them and understand their perspective. I’ve unfriended people who voted for him. Family members who continue to support him are, much like Thanksgiving this year, cancelled. 

I understand the temptation to aim for a shred of normalcy in these tortured times. It’s getting cold. We’ve been in lockdown for nine months and we finally have many positive things to look forward to. We are witnessing the sputtering end of the disastrous Trump era and the dawn of a new administration that believes in science, accountability and racial justice. An administration that doesn’t think the press is “the enemy of the people.” A promising vaccine is on the horizon and may be distributed within a few months. 

We can celebrate all that next year. For now, let’s reject toxic individualism and the real enemy of the people: misinformation. Let’s work to honor the heroism of healthcare workers and enable the survival of our communities. Let’s just not die. 

 

 

 
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Thanksgiving elegy

by Rachel Dodes

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    [post_content] => Four years of Trump will leave some bruises, but we can own them.

The most dangerous time in an abusive relationship comes when the victim tries to leave. If you recognize President Donald Trump’s relationship with American democracy as an abusive one—and the comparison to domestic abuse is certainly popular—then you can imagine how destructive the two-month transition period to a Biden presidency is going to be.

Every abuser has enablers. In Trump’s case, they are powerful Republicans using his lame duck period for their own selfish gains: these include Mike Pompeo, who is clearly eyeing a 2024 run, and is courting Trump’s base with little “jokes” about “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” even after Joe Biden’s decisive win; or Mitch McConnell, who is supporting Trump’s refusal to concede because the president remains a useful tool for him to wield against the Democrats. This is not a coup, but it’s still destructive and dangerous. By trying to convince the public that he didn’t lose the election, Trump and his enablers are eroding the public’s already shaky trust in U.S. institutions; worse, this is happening in the midst of a pandemic and a financial crisis, which further exacerbate the country’s black mood.

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I wrote about my experience of working for a pathological narcissist and how it taught me to recognize and predict Donald Trump’s behavior patterns.  One way the editor I worked for manipulated and punished writers who displeased him was purposely to leave errors he could have fixed in their pieces, and then use those errors to attack them. This made no sense: by publishing texts with errors, the man in charge was ultimately damaging his own credibility. But narcissists don’t see things that way. Every situation is about the narcissist and not the organization to which they belong, or which they represent. This is why Trump will try, as his psychologist niece Mary Trump is predicting, to “burn it all down” before he is forced to leave the Oval Office on January 20. A narcissist does not feel beholden to any office, even if it’s the highest office in the most powerful nation in the world. A narcissist is only beholden to a fragile ego. 

By firing officials like Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, pushing out senior advisors like acting undersecretary of defense James Anderson, and threatening to sack any staffer who looks for a new job or shows support for outgoing officials, Trump is demonstrating narcissistic rage in full bloom. The Republicans in power are going along with Trump, partly because they obviously don’t believe the Democratic party will deliver any kind of repercussions for their craven, destructive behavior.

If you’re upset about what’s going on, that’s good! You ought to be! It’s an upsetting situation. 

At  the same time, there are useful and useless ways of being upset. You’re not helping anyone, including yourself, if you allow this situation to beat you down. Remember, one of the abuser’s most salient goals is to create chaos and to exhaust you. Don’t let Trump do this to you.

Second, we shouldn’t treat Trump as a dictator. He is not. I would argue that he has exposed just how vulnerable the United States is to the rise of a dictatorship. But treating Trump as a dictator can only create a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Instead, Donald Trump is an aspiring dictator who wants to tear the country apart. This is why it’s important to have dialogue — but not the fluffy, “let’s understand the violent racists who gleefully voted for Trump” kind. Rather, we need to have a serious, grounded conversation about our political realities with people we can actually reach. 

It is easy to succumb to dismay and despair with the knowledge that 70 million voters cast their ballots for Trump. But despair is a luxury and dismay is counter-productive. We must internalize the understanding that our society is sharply divided over the pandemic response; that we have different psychological models for engaging leadership; that we are drowning in disinformation; and that the vast majority of white evangelical Christians support Trump not despite his racism,  misogyny and authoritarianism, but because those characteristics reflect their own worldview.  Remember, instead, that voter turnout was at historically high levels for this election, with an enormous grassroots organizing effort bearing fruit with significant early voting that flipped red states blue and won Joe Biden the presidency. Yes, there are unsavory political realities on the ground; but rather than be discouraged, we should categorize and prioritize them right now. You might not be able to change the mind of a Nazi who loves Trump, but you can certainly engage with and combat disinformation.

Now is the time to hold our elected leaders to account. Political battlegrounds are important too — which is why we should look to Georgia, where former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams built a grassroots effort to register more than 800,000 voters who were primarily Black, Asian, and Latinx. Her success, and the historic voter turnout for the Biden/Harris ticket, show the power of organizing, and of positive messaging. All three candidates emphasized the power of the individual and community to effect change, and the importance of compassion. This is clearly what a tired, angry populace needed to hear.

History holds important lessons for this moment. In Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar, authors Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni paint a vivid picture of Cato the Younger, a follower of stoicism who fought against corruption brought on by wealth and empire; and against both Pompey and Caesar, as each man struggled to control Rome. This narrative should sound familiar. Yet even as Trump tries to hold onto the presidency in order to avoid being prosecuted for his debts—echoing Caesar’s own financial troubles—we should remember that Donald Trump is no Julius Caesar. On the other hand, Cato’s rigid idealism is a cautionary tale for Americans in that it shows how refusal to compromise can help bring an entire republic crashing down. For all his inspiring integrity, Cato’s life comes with its own warnings. 

The lesson is this: like Cato, we should retain our principles; but unlike Cato, we should be cognizant of realities with which we live. Yes, the United States is a messed-up country, but it’s our country. We’re not going to recover from Trump without bruises, but we can own those bruises. We shouldn’t entertain illusions about life simply going back to normal with the Biden administration, but we can draw valuable lessons from the Trump era going forward. Surviving an abuser has its own advantages, as I know personally. The experience makes one stronger and wiser. After four years of abuse at the hands of Donald Trump, you will never lose your ability to identify a malignant narcissist.
    [post_title] => How to survive Trumpism and even laugh
    [post_excerpt] => Remember, one of the abuser’s most salient goals is to create chaos and to exhaust you. Don’t let Trump do this to you.
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How to survive Trumpism and even laugh

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => Gender equality in Belarus looks good on paper, but comes with many caveats. 

Less than five minutes into a recent television appearance, the interviewer asked Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya about her last time in a kitchen. Tsikhanouskaya is generally believed to have won the August presidential election in Belarus, beating the long-term authoritarian ruler, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. During the election campaign, Tsikhanouskaya referenced her role as a housewife in what turned out to be a politically savvy move. Diverse groups within Belarus — reformists, conservatives, feminists — could all see a reflection of their ideals in Tsikhanouskaya. Conservatives could see a loving housewife and mother; reformists, an opportunity for change; and feminists saw a viable female candidate for the presidency. But the housewife trope was also used to undermine her. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed that while he was sure Tsikhanouskaya could cook a good cutlet, how could he debate with her? The President sought to diminish his female opponent by comparing her knowledge of the kitchen to her lack of political experience.

During the election campaign and the now three month-old protest movement against Lukashenka’s blatant attempt to rig the results, the media spotlight has deservedly focused on Belarusian women for the outsized role they have played leading the struggle for fair elections, an end to egregious police violence, and peaceful regime change. Maria Kalesnikava, a political activist who was abducted by security forces on September 7 and then jailed, and Nina Bahinskaya, the 73 year old woman who is an iconic protest figure, have become household names for their roles in the protest movement.

However, the long-term impact on women’s role and position in society is more difficult to gauge. While a reporter for The New York Times wrote that the movement has “already shattered deeply entrenched gender stereotypes built up over generations,” and Belarusian media TUT.BY labelled it a “feminist revolution,” this view is not shared by everyone. Women have certainly played a pivotal role, but there is a great deal of work to do in mobilizing this newfound empowerment to dismantle Belarus’s deeply entrenched patriarchal system.

Barriers facing Belarusian women

On paper, Belarus is a leader in gender equality. In The Global Gender Gap Index 2020, it is ranked 29th out of 153 countries for women’s economic participation, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment. It has signed and ratified international legal frameworks on gender equality. At 69 percent, the share of women in the Belarusian judiciary is high. The Women’s Power Index shows that women have 35 percent representation in parliament, exceeding many European countries and giving Belarus a world ranking of 39th.

On closer inspection, however, gender equality in Belarus comes with caveats. In the Cabinet, where more decision-making power lies, women’s representation falls to 3 percent. In 2004, Lukashenka declared that the presence of women in Parliament, makes it “stable and calm,” and that it will ensure that “the male Members of Parliament work properly,” thus reducing a woman's role to one of a caretaker or matron. True, there were a handful of high profile women in Belarusian politics before the August election—such as Lukashenka's press secretary Natalya Eismont, Senate Speaker Natalya Kochanova, and the Head of Central Election Committee, Lidziya Yarmoshyna—but their prominence does not reflect the reality for most Belarusian women.

The 2019 UN Gender Equality Brief highlighted entrenched systematic gender norms and stereotypes as the biggest challenge to gender equality in Belarus, where a woman’s role is defined primarily as wife and mother. The majority of men and women in Belarus believe that being a housewife is as fulfilling as working for pay, with more women agreeing with this statement than men. Maternity leave is up to three years. This might sound ideal to women in the United States, where there is no legally mandated maternity leave, but because employers in Belarus are legally required to hold a woman’s job open for her while she is on leave, women of child-bearing age can see their careers suffer. A General Director of a medium-sized factory in Minsk once told me that it is common practice to weed out newly-married women when hiring to avoid taking on an employee who is likely to seek maternity leave. This is contributing to the wage gap that is currently around 25 percent and growing. A 2019 UN report found that almost every second woman in Belarus has faced partner violence; yet in October 2018, Lukashenka dismissed a new law on the prevention of domestic violence, decrying it as “nonsense” borrowed “from the West.”

The three graces

After the government prevented the three most popular male candidates from running as opponents of Lukashenka in the August election, women stepped up to form the main opposition. Tsikhanouskaya ran in place of her imprisoned husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski; she was joined by Veranika Tsapkala representing her husband Valery Tsapkala, who had been forced to flee; and Maria Kalesnikava, who was the campaign manager for imprisoned opposition candidate Viktar Babaryka. It took just 15 minutes for the three women to agree to unite campaigns, something previous opposition had never managed to achieve. Over the course of the campaign, they emerged as a powerful triumvirate; it is because of their work, many believe, that Tsikhanouskaya won the election.

Hundreds of thousands attended Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign rallies across Belarus, amassing huge support. But for Galina Dzesiatava, project manager at the NGO Gender Perspectives, there was also disappointment. Dzesiatava attended the rally in Homel, in southeastern Belarus, where Tsikhanouskaya expressed her desire to be “back in the kitchen frying cutlets.” Another moment that stung for Dzesiatava was when Tsikhanouskaya said “I do not have a program for changing Belarus,” adding “the men…have it.” deferring to the excluded male candidates. Dzesiatava said she “was devastated” upon hearing this. 

Irina Solomatina, the founder of the project Gender Route and the Head of the Council of the Belarusian Organisation of Working Women, noted the lack of a feminist agenda in the campaign. Solomatina said they “mentioned social problems exclusively in terms of care” (for husbands, children..). In their rhetoric, “there was no place for either feminist or gender agendas.” Women rights’ issues, such as domestic violence and labour discrimination, were not mentioned during the campaign.

The women’s protests

Katya* created the initial Telegram group ‘Girl Power’ on the evening of  August 11, following two nights of protests against the fraudulent election results, which police broke up with brutal violence. She could never have foreseen the impact of a group chat she said she originally made “for close friends and friends of their friends.” The initial plan was for a flashmob of women to meet at Komarovka market in Minsk the next day wearing white and holding flowers. Katya said “the goal [of the flashmob] was to transform the violent energy of protest into something safe and inspiring.” The chat, which began inviting people that evening, had more than 8,600 members by morning, “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Katya said. By the afternoon, thousands of women were joining hands and lining the streets all over the country. Katya and her friends had to learn fast, “it was our first chat on Telegram. Me and my friends at first had no clue how to handle it, how to pin messages, change settings etc. We had to learn on the go.” Still in awe of the power behind the protests, Katya reveals that it began as “kind of a bet” saying “I promised my friend and sister that I [would] think of a safer way for us to protest.”

Katya also noted that at the time she encountered a backlash from some women who saw this form of protest — of wearing white and carrying flowers —as “revealing our weakness.” She received comments like “flowers? Don’t forget about candies for the torturers too.” Solomatina echoed this perspective, arguing that these female protests perpetuated patriarchal values and stereotypes, appealing to beauty and softness. But Solomatina also highlighted the argument that it would have been a sin “not to take advantage of the patriarchal way of life.” The idea to play on gender stereotypes and roles was central to the performance of a Belarusian lullaby as part of the protests, where women stood barefoot dressed in white holding flowers. They altered the lyrics of the lullaby, calling upon those near them to open their eyes—instead of closing them. Dzesiatava said that in these protests, the women were successfully “playing the patriarchal system against the patriarchal system.”

Leandra Bias, a Gender and Peacebuilding Advisor at Swisspeace, said that foreign feminists observing from the outside sometimes “think they know which female tropes and roles are the most emancipating” but that actually “we know nothing about the lived reality of Belarusian women.” Bias added that “when it comes to women protesting, they are the ones who know best how to navigate their daily lives, they know what is going to be effective.” 

The Fem Group

One aspect of the movement with a clear feminist agenda is the Fem Group, a working group of the Coordination Council for the Transfer of Power, founded by Tsikhanouskaya. The Fem Group was created to ensure that women are involved in all the transformation processes that would follow regime change. Their work includes increasing the visibility of women’s political participation, documenting state violence against women and raising awareness of state violence against men. The group are currently conducting an anonymous study on the needs of Belarusian women and the tools required to support them.

While Lukashenka labelled Tsikhanouskaya a “poor thing” during the election campaign, he now appears to have woken up to the political force women possess. The women’s marches, initially left alone by the regime, were soon subject to a cruel crackdown. Russia put out an arrest warrant for Tsikhanouskaya, who is now in exile in neighboring Lithuania, while Kalesnikava is in prison after tearing up her passport at the border to prevent police from expelling her from the country. Prominent Belarusian feminists Olga Shparaga, Yulia Mitskevich and Svetlana Gatalskaya have all recently spent time in prison. While under arrest Shparaga conducted tutorials on feminism for fellow prisoners from her prison cell.

Belarusian feminism

“Feminism” is still largely a taboo word in Belarus. Few women openly identify as a feminist, and there are many women currently marching each weekend who would balk at the label. A survey carried out back in 2012 which analysed attitudes towards feminism found that just four percent of women considered themselves feminists and more than half of the men surveyed said that they would treat such women with disgust. In 2016, fewer than one percent of Belarusian NGOs advanced women’s rights, and fewer still identified themselves as feminist. 

Yuliya* is an activist from Minsk who has been organizing peaceful evening gatherings; when asked how she perceives feminism she replied: “I can’t say I’m fully aware of what ‘feminism’ really means.” Katya*, the founder of Girl Power, said she identifies as a “humanist more than a feminist.”

This may change. One of the potential impacts of the current women-led protest movement is an acceptance of the term ‘feminist’ in Belarus. Kalesnikava, who openly identifies as a feminist, says that Lukashenka “accidentally did more for the development of feminism in Belarus than anyone else,” adding that “feminism will stop being a dirty word.” 

Nonetheless, feminism is advancing in Belarus. In 2019 there were more than 470 educational activities associated with women’s rights—workshops, lectures, and roundtables—and more than 2,500 consultations in legal, psychological and business support. Events in the gender sphere attracted over 5,000 participants. Some of the female-led initiatives in Belarus include: March on Baby, which aims to introduce a domestic violence law; Wen-do, which conducts self-defense training for women; and Her Rights, which strengthens women’s awareness of their rights. Gender Digest stresses however, that this work that promotes gender equality is often invisible to a wider audience.

Long-term impact

Renewed awareness of domestic violence is another source of hope. The widely publicized violence of OMON, the paramilitary security forces, repulsed many, but Dzesiatava explained that “OMON are actually the fabric of Belarusian society — this level of violence has always been visible for feminists and it is now visible to everyone.” The overt violence seen today was being committed before, but behind closed doors. Now that the violence is out in the open it will be harder to ignore; the hope is that this will inspire a national conversation about domestic violence. Dzesiatava draws parallels between an abusive domestic relationship and that of the regime and the Belarusian people. Bias noted the same thing, adding that “the most dangerous moment for someone in an abusive relationship is when they decide to leave”—just as Belarusians want to leave Lukashenka. 

The August election and subsequent protests have seen both classic femininity and feminism being used and inverted. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has become a feminist icon around the world, but she never intended for that to be. Belarusian feminism still faces many barriers, including the use of patriarchal tropes by both women and men. Yet Belarusian women are defining a feminism of their own, one that fits their lived reality, and it may well be that regime change will enable a redefining of the women’s agenda, offering up space for new opportunities. The recent women-led uprising may not necessarily be called ‘feminist’ but, as Galina Dzesiatava makes clear, they have been dubbed the ‘Revolution of Dignity,’ and dignity is a basic tenet of feminism.
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The Belarusian protests: feminized, but feminist?

by Alexandra St John Murphy

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    [post_content] => Legacy media outlets do their readers a vast disservice in presenting the minority of anti-Trump evangelicals as evidence of a broader change in attitudes.

The Trump era in American politics, which I sincerely hope comes to an end in 2021, will be forever marked by widespread public consternation over the often enthusiastic support of the Christian Right, and white evangelicals above all, for a corrupt, “pussy-grabbing,” tenth-rate would-be dictator. Over the past four years I have been trying to explain why evangelical Trump support is not only unsurprising, but also the logical culmination of the evangelical culture wars I was born into and mobilized for.

Unfortunately, legacy media outlets in the United States continue to resist this hard truth. With less than one week left before the November 3 election, they are amplifying the small minority of white evangelicals that support former Vice President Joe Biden, instead of explaining why the vast majority of white evangelicals will never dump Trump. They are also irresponsibly pushing the tired old trope that young evangelicals are changing evangelicalism for the better, in ways that will materialize any day now. Apparently we just have to keep waiting, much like Christians have been waiting for the Second Coming for the last 2,000 years.

Why do legacy media outlets continue to amplify the small liberal minority among white evangelical Christians?  Daniel Schultz, a United Church of Christ pastor and veteran civic activist, observed that they “make a good story: you’ve got white evangelicals going against the grain, so it’s unusual, and you have people standing up for their morals (or at least pretending to do so), so it’s inspirational.” However, he said, journalists need to ask whether the atypical evangelical individuals and initiatives they’re highlighting represent “meaningful change.”

Of course, the outliers do deserve some media coverage. One example is Not Our Faith Political Action Committee, a bipartisan PAC devoted to helping defeat Trump. But reporters glosses over the salient point that this organization’s  advisory council, though composed of Protestants and Catholics, is ethnically far more diverse than the white evangelicals and white Catholics who voted for Trump in 2016. Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden, which is is prominently supported by Billy Graham’s granddaughter Jerushah Duford, likewise deserves coverage—but responsible reporting should include some healthy skepticism of Duford’s optimism about evangelicals’ ability to change for the better, given the documented resiliency of authoritarianism in conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture.

The handful of white evangelicals who oppose Trump are notably more visible, and seemingly more organized, on behalf of a Democratic presidential candidate, than any similar group has been in recent memory. And there is a non-zero chance that their efforts might actually shift a few votes in swing states, which could in turn make the difference in what will most likely be a tight contest in the Electoral College even if there is a popular vote landslide for Biden, which is likely. All of this, of course, assumes a free and fair election that plays out relatively smoothly, which is certainly not a given.

Eighty percent of the white evangelical vote went to Trump in 2016, a historic high. Trump’s share of that vote could fall back into the 70s, though this seems unlikely given the GOP’s hypocritical rush to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat with charismatic Catholic extremist Amy Coney Barrett; her confirmation places the overturning of the Supreme Court’s Roe and Obergefell decisions within the Christian Right’s grasp if the composition of the court remains untouched. A Biden administration could expand the SCOTUS to restore fairness, and, while I believe it should do so, you can be sure Trump’s evangelical base will keep this possibility in mind as something to avoid by voting for Trump.

Jerushah Duford’s first name is derived from the Hebrew word for “inheritance,” but it is the notoriously bigoted and rabidly pro-Trump Franklin Graham, son of Billy, who far more embodies not only the legacy of “American’s pastor,” but also white evangelical subculture. America’s elite public sphere places far too little emphasis on that sobering fact.

If we are ever to have a proper reckoning with this moment, which is far from guaranteed even if Biden wins the 2020 presidential election handily, we will need to face not only the fact that white evangelical subculture is essentially authoritarian, but also the role of the media in obscuring that truth, and by extension enabling authoritarianism via the normalization of extremism. Major media outlets need much better religion reporting; unfortunately, however, the organizations willing to fund religion journalism, like the Lilly Endowment in my native Indianapolis, tend to be heavily biased in favor of conservative Christians.

The relatively small number of journalists who cover religion do their readers a great disservice by taking the word of the people they report on at face value, when they should be questioning them with some skepticism. Conservative Christians maintain they are misunderstood; in response, reporters seem to be striving to tell only positive stories about them, no matter how harmful the politics of those Christians might be to those who do not share their views.

It is wildly irresponsible to equate “good” religion journalism with highlighting moderate to liberal evangelical youth as if they are typical, as in this example from The New York Times, and/or parroting the aggrieved talking points of their authoritarian counterparts as if they represent “the gospel truth,” or at least something worthy of the public’s sympathy, as in this example from The Washington Post.

Or take this combative, aggressively defensive opinion piece in defense of white evangelicals published by Religion News Service in the final run-up to this year’s election. Titled “Demonizing White Evangelicals Won’t Solve Our Political Divisions,” it is another iteration of the “very fine people on both sides” argument. The writer, Arthur E. Farnsley II, posits that both liberal and conservative Americans are responsible for the divisions in our society, when it is well established that the country’s polarization is asymmetric and driven primarily from the right.

Farnsley writes that critics of right-wing evangelicals must build bridges, but provides no evidence that anyone has engaged in “demonizing” white evangelicals, let alone elite journalists and commentators. That is, unless his definition of “demonizing” is presenting the public with highly substantiated facts about the intimate connections between American white supremacism and predominantly white churches, and daring to suggest that the people who lead and attend the churches most complicit in white supremacism should be held accountable.

In a powerful response to Farnsley’s commentary in his Substack newsletter, ex-evangelical podcaster Blake Chastain, who is a friend of mine, pointed out that “it is white evangelicals who hold the flame and set fire to bridges, both in their churches and in the public square.”

We must not be taken in by Farnsley’s gaslighting, nor by right-wing extremism wrapped in “civil” trappings by “respectable” evangelicals who understand the damage that Trump support has done to their brand, and thus seek to distance evangelicalism from Trump.

The latest example of the latter comes from heavyweight Calvinist theologian John Piper’s blog, Desiring God. In a post that made waves on Twitter when it dropped on October 22, Piper strongly hinted that he will be abstaining from voting for president this year, characterizing the two choices as “death by abortion” (Biden) and “death by arrogance” (Trump). But there is simply no way to build a bridge between advocates of democracy and human rights,  on the one hand, and people like Piper who casually make false and conspiratorial statements like, “I think Planned Parenthood is a code name for baby-killing,” on the other.

How does America move forward from the Christian nationalist surge of the Trump years? Those committed to liberal democracy can and should look to build bridges with conservative Christians like Duford, who has shown a willingness to break ranks with evangelical authoritarianism and to operate in good faith in a pluralistic democracy. However, if we look away from what conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture definitively is— i.e., anti-pluralist, anti-democratic, and incapable of significant cultural change from the inside—we cannot move the country forward. Those characteristics represent unreconstructed America, and those who exhibit them must be pushed to the political sidelines or the United States will always be at risk of the unreconstructed minority imposing authoritarian, white supremacist patriarchal rule.

As sociologist of religion Andrew Whitehead, who studies evangelicals, recently observed, “there is so much inertia institutionally that it will take an extremely long time for white evangelicalism to change, and I have a hard time seeing that happen. It will be so interesting to see if younger evangelicals just leave or conform. My suspicion is those who truly embrace environmentalism or LGBTQ-affirmation, for example, will end up leaving.” And indeed, many are leaving.

True, 16 percent of the white evangelical vote went to Hillary Clinton in 2016. As Schultz explains, “About 15-25 percent of white evangelicals are liberals or at least moderates. So there's always someone to go against the majority, creating the necessary drama for a media piece.” Nevertheless, he stressed that “the numbers don’t lie: somewhere around 80 percent of white evangelicals support Trump, and that’s in line with white evangelical support for GOP presidential candidates going back to at least 2004. In other words, white evangelicals are the Republican base, and there's simply no reason to think that’s changing in this election.”

 
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Pro-Biden white evangelicals are a minority. The vast majority will support Trump

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_date] => 2020-10-22 17:38:21
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    [post_content] => Sixty years after James Baldwin fled to Europe to escape his native country's racism, Americans are once again leaving to seek a better life.

Election day in the U.S. is November 3, but some Americans have already voted with their feet, fleeing a country whose values have become anathema to them: racism, police violence, the bizarre fantasies of QAnon, exorbitant living costs and daily anxiety of life under a Trump administration.

The U.S. government does not collect data on Americans who leave the country, but estimates that 8.7 million live abroad. A website with information on how to leave says that since May 2020 it has seen its traffic surge by 1,605 percent, or sixteen fold, for Americans seeking information on which countries are open and how to move.

Even if Trump loses, it appears that none of them will be rushing back.

“We do not plan to return to the U.S., regardless of the election outcome,” said Corritta Lewis, who moved in August with her wife and their year-old son to Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Like Tiffanie Drayton, a Black American writer whose June 12 New York Times Opinion piece about “fleeing” America to Guyana went viral, Ms. Lewis sees no future in the United States.  “A new president doesn't change the systemic racism, police brutality, wealth gap, and overall experience as a black woman in America. It took hundreds of years to build a society of oppression; that won't change in four.”

They left, she said, “due to the increased racial tensions, police encounters, politics, and overall safety. My wife and I are two Black women raising a biracial son, and we didn't want him to live in a country where his parents are harassed by police for being Black.” She continued, “On more than one occasion, we have been stopped and questioned by police for no reason. His first interaction with police scared him to the point that we cried for almost five minutes. It broke our hearts… We were simply two Black women in a nice neighborhood, taking a morning walk.”

“We haven't felt this free in our lives,” she added. “Mexico will probably be our home for the next several years… As the election approaches, I watch in horror and am scared for my family still in the States. I don't have confidence that things will get better anytime soon.”

For Black Americans, the choice to flee police brutality, racism and income inequality is compelling. For others, economic pressures can feel just as overwhelming. Why spend more than you have to for a safe and healthy life?

Tim Leffel, 56, and his family, chose Guanajuato, a colonial city in Mexico, in 2018; he has written a book explaining how to move abroad to more than 20 countries. “Our daughter is 20 now, but she went to school in Mexico for three years: one of elementary, two of middle school. Private school, but all in Spanish,” he said.

“We had no reason to stay in the U.S. and keep paying inflated prices for rent, healthcare, and other expenses. We own our home outright in Mexico. Living in Trump's America was becoming more stressful and unpleasant every month, so why pay a premium to put up with that deterioration?”

“It's doubtful we'll move back,” he adds. “The U.S. is just way overpriced for what you get, especially in terms of healthcare, the worst value in the world for self-employed people like me. If a new president and congress can get us to universal healthcare, different story.

For travel blogger Ketti Wilhelm, 30, being married to an Italian means moving back to his country of origin. Wilhelm has spent much of her life living and working outside the U.S. She and her husband have no children and can work remotely. “We'll most likely move back to Milan, because my husband's family is near there, and we both have friends and connections there.”

“Our motivations are political, but it's also about much more than that,” said Wilhelm. “It's what the politics means for living in the U.S.: minimal vacation time, no family leave, no pension, health insurance stress and massive health care costs. Not to mention safety concerns – guns, white supremacy, and mass shootings. All of this is because “socialism” is a dirty word in the U.S., whereas in all the other countries I've lived, it's just part of a modern, well-run and equitable society. There are other ways of living, both culturally and politically, and in plenty of ways, I think they're doing it better elsewhere.” Her recent blog post offers 11 ways to live and work overseas.

Working as an E.R. physician in training horrifies medical student Alex Cabrera, 30, who lives in Reno, Nevada. Now in his final year of medical school and taking an online degree in public health, he sees patients every day whose care, he knows, can medically bankrupt them—even with insurance. “It’s so hard to live here! Wages aren’t going anywhere, unemployment benefits have been cut, people have no health insurance and the rent here for a one bedroom is $1,200.” He recently drove a friend his age to her new home in Victoria, British Columbia and saw another leave for France.

He’s desperate to flee. “I feel like I’m screaming into the void. On one side, you have Donald Trump who just makes it up as he goes along and Biden promising to improve and expand the A.C.A. (Affordable Care Act), which the Supreme Court plans to overthrow.” He wanted to find a medical residency abroad but is resigned to doing his training in the U.S. for the next four years. “As a physician, it’s almost hard to practice medicine in this country when everything is about profit and patient care is secondary. I’m so tired of this system.”

Because the United States remains a global hot spot for exponential transmission of the novel coronavirus, most countries are no longer allowing its citizens to enter without a pre-approved visa. Exceptions among the European countries include Croatia, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine. “However all European countries are accepting and approving applications for resident and work visas for U.S. citizens,” says Cepee Tabibian, founder of a website with information for women over 30 who choose to leave the U.S. “They can't [currently] travel to most European countries,  but they can still apply to move right now,” she said. And prior knowledge isn’t an issue, she adds. “You'd be surprised how many people move to a country they have never been to or have maybe visited once in their life.”

Tim Page is one. A Pulitzer-winning music critic and journalism professor at the University of Southern California, he boarded a flight from New York to Belgrade a few months ago, arriving to live in a place he’d never seen. He owns a house in Nova Scotia, but the Canadian border remains closed to Americans and he was deeply disturbed by the U.S. government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He wanted out.

“I'd had some students at USC who came from Belgrade and who kindly adopted me on Facebook and took me out once I had begun to acclimate myself,” he says. “My welcome was a warm one, and this may have been the most beautiful and radiant autumn I've experienced since childhood. It's a fantastic walking city and built in so many layers…I feel very much at home.”

“I'm unmated, I have no dog, my children are grown and doing well. I communicate with my friends through video conversations, phone calls, email, and I keep a nervous eye on developments in the States through on-line television. It's a much gentler life and, at 66, I appreciate the order,” Page adds. The rent for his one-bedroom apartment is $400 a month.

“I'll stay until I want to return,” he says. “Social Security has just kicked in. I have dear friends in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and London whom I'd love to see when things open up a bit, but life is startlingly less expensive here and I think this will likely be "home base" for me in Europe for however long I stay. I'm much more at ease than I've been in a while.”
    [post_title] => 'Another Country,' redux: Americans are (again) moving abroad to seek a better life
    [post_excerpt] => For Black Americans, the choice to flee police brutality, racism and income inequality is compelling. For others, economic pressures can feel just as overwhelming.
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‘Another Country,’ redux: Americans are (again) moving abroad to seek a better life

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_date] => 2020-10-16 04:44:02
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    [post_content] => “Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value.”
--Joe Biden

In 2019, America spent $732 billion on its military. China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil spent $726 billion combined. Since American defense philosophy is predicated on the belief that national defense is better carried out abroad rather than at home, it spends billions of dollars on overseas military bases—of which the U.S. has more than any other nation—and aircraft carriers.

Meanwhile, more than 210,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and more than 7 million have contracted the virus, according to the Center for Disease Control. But the Republican-controlled Senate has refused to approve bills initiated by the Democrats, which would provide relief of $2,000 per month to people deprived of an income, even as frontline healthcare workers struggled during the height of the pandemic to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) while the federal government declined to help. 

The country with the biggest economy in the world failed to protect its citizens from unemployment, economic recession, and a pandemic. 

It’s clear we value guns and other weapons of war over the medical needs of citizens those arms are supposed to protect. 

Last summer, as financial relief to individuals under the CARES Act was about to end, Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey proposed an amendment to the $740.5 billion annual defense budget that would cut 10 percent, or $74 billion, and invest the funds in education, healthcare, and housing in poor communities. 

The Senate rejected the amendment, with 37 Democrats joining their Republican colleagues to vote “no.” Senators Sanders, Warren, and Markey were among those who voted in favor of the amendment. 

In the House, Democrats split 92-139 against the amendment to cut the defense budget. This prompted Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat representing California’s 17th District, to tweet: "I don’t want to hear anyone tell me that we can’t enhance expanded unemployment benefits when we spend more on endless wars than the next ten countries combined."



Bernie Sanders argued that the cut would help create jobs by building schools, affordable housing, hospitals, sustainable energy, clean water facilities and other community centered needs that have been proven to improve health and decrease crime. It would help the federal government improve education by reducing class sizes, increasing teacher pay and supporting free public tuition for universities, colleges and trade schools.  

More poignantly, Sanders said:

 If this horrific coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it is that national security involves a lot more than bombs, missiles, tanks, submarines, nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction. National security also means doing all we can to improve the lives of the American people, many of whom have been abandoned by our government for decades.

The United States government claims to be protecting its citizens from foreign threats, yet cannot shield them from domestic ills like homelessness, underpaid teachers, the lack of universal healthcare, and failure to implement a minimum wage that keeps full-time workers out of poverty. 

The conservative position is that a superpower needs a strong military to protect itself from “emerging threats” in China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. 

But what good is a strong military if it protects a nation that cannot provide food to low-income school children? 

And what good is it to be a nuclear power if America cannot solve the problem of Black women—ironically America’s most committed voters—dying at childbirth at higher rates than any other ethnic group in America?

President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of an oversized military when he spoke of an overinvestment in military spending and the excessive influence of the “military industrial complex.”

We have failed to heed that warning. We need to reimagine what safety means.

America’s defense policy needs to change, beginning with its position on nuclear weapons. As late as the 1980s, the United States and the former Soviet Union held close to 90 percent of the world’s nearly 75,000 nuclear weapons; through various nuclear non-proliferation treaties, that figure has dropped to around 14,000, with the U.S. and the Russian Federation continuing to hold 90 percent. 

Serious, knowledgeable people have called for reducing America’s weapons stockpile.

William Perry, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration, wrote in a 2017 Washington Post op-ed that America’s proposed $1.7 trillion nuclear weapons spending was unnecessary. No surprise attack could destroy all of the navy’s submarines, he explained; but the risk of a conventionally armed cruise missile being mistaken for one with a nuclear warhead was real—as shown by the three narrowly averted Cold War catastrophes. Moreover, cutting nuclear-armed cruise missiles and cancelling plans to replace Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) stockpiles would save $30 billion and $149 billion, respectively—i.e., more than double the $75 billion that would be saved with a 10 percent cut to the current military budget. 

Similarly, Berry Blechman of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., argued in a 2016 opinion for the New York Times that the $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program approved by President Obama was unnecessary because it would “impose an increasing burden on the defense budget, making it difficult to maintain our conventional military superiority—the real guarantee of U.S. security.” Like Perry, Blechman recommends cutting more than 100 ICBMs. 

Defunding the Pentagon is an essential strategy for appropriating funds to social services, exactly as is defunding police departments that do not actually reduce crime. This is a message the public needs to hear.

America has 6,800 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. But it only takes 100 nuclear weapons to destroy the Earth. And yet, the Trump Administration has asked for $29 billion in nuclear weapons spending for the 2021 fiscal budget—even though the president’s own Air Force Chief of Staff has argued that the Pentagon cannot afford it. 

COVID-19 has killed more Americans than the five most recent wars the U.S. has been involved in combined. Our current military outlook is too focused on defending the homeland instead of actual Americans who actually reside in it. Republicans are angling to push through a SCOTUS nominee to end the Affordable Care Act, threatening to strip millions of Americans of the only healthcare safety net they have—during a pandemic.  

Small businesses are struggling to secure COVID-19 relief while Donald Trump, a billionaire, notoriously paid only $750 per year in federal income tax.

During the 2012 presidential debates, Mitt Romney worried that the U.S. had fewer naval ships than at any other point in the country’s history—to which Obama responded that it also had fewer horses and bayonets. In other words, having more doesn’t make us stronger; on the contrary, being smaller and nimbler makes us more efficient. Obama was wrong to dismiss the threat to U.S. security posed by the Kremlin, but Putin’s most potent weapon wasn’t the military: it was disinformation and election meddling, against which Republicans in Washington refuse to protect the nation. 

The United States Postal Service is an essential service, particularly during a pandemic election year, when millions are choosing to mail their ballots rather than risk being infected by COVID-19 while standing in line to vote. And yet, the USPS is facing a budget crisis. We are a democracy that can single-handedly destroy the Earth, but can’t make it possible for every citizen to vote.

The knowledge that we have an arsenal of unnecessary nuclear weapons and a military capable of occupying several nations simultaneously might make conservatives feel secure. I’m willing to bet, however, that most Americans would rather have universal healthcare, affordable housing, and improved public education. That silent majority must surely feel some bitterness at seeing their tax dollars allocated to fund endless wars when the local hospital doesn’t even have enough ventilators to save all the Covid-19 patients. 

 
    [post_title] => The case for taking from the Pentagon and giving to the people
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The case for taking from the Pentagon and giving to the people

by Terrell J. Starr

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    [post_date] => 2020-10-09 04:32:33
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    [post_content] => Belarusians have found a unifying crucible in their resistance to state violence.

Mass demonstrations erupted in Belarus on August 9 to protest what was widely viewed as a rigged election that gave long-time strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 26-years, a victory over the popular incumbent. The protests have continued on a daily basis for nearly two months, despite mass arrests, beatings, and torture. The largest civil society movement in Belarus’s history is shaping the future of this former Soviet bloc country.

Mikita Mikado, 34 years old, is the CEO of PandaDoc, a California-based software company. From his office in San Francisco, he is following the news from his home country of Belarus. In the midst of the nationwide protests over the result of the presidential election and a crackdown of unprecedented force, he stepped in and urged police officers to resign. Money? “We can solve it,” he promised.

Never before, Mikado said, had he felt like standing up against Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader who has been president of Belarus since 1994. The breaking point was when he watched in horror as his fellow countrymen were dragged away and beaten up by riot police.

“I knew someone who was tortured and beaten,” he said. “I could no longer stay silent and do nothing, when stun grenades were exploding on the streets.”

Mikado’s crowdfunding initiative, Protect Belarus, was successful: over the ensuing three weeks it raised money to financially support police officers who quit their jobs. Hundreds of security forces members applied for re-training in the technology industry and for financial aid.

For years, Belarus’s rapidly expanding IT industry coexisted with Lukashenko’s government, keeping out of politics while benefiting from preferential tax rates and little regulation. For many tech professionals, the luxury of having a stable and relatively well-paid job allowed them the privilege of not following politics.

That relationship was already changing ahead of the August 9 election. Valery Tsepkalo, a former Belarusian ambassador to the United States and founder of the Hi-Tech Park— the Minsk equivalent of Silicon Valley—joined the opposition. Some startups created apps to monitor vote counts and collect data on poll violations.

Young and savvy engineers, fashion designers and successful entrepreneurs joined the protests. Passivity became just what a country could no longer afford. The middle class that long flourished within the system began separating from it. Post-election violence became the last straw.

An apolitical nation fights

Middle class disenchantment with the regime became apparent during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lukashenko played down the danger posed by the virus and dismissed it as mass “psychosis.” He said it was a minor health issue that could be cured easily with a shot of vodka, or with a day of working on the farm. A mass Victory Day military parade went off as scheduled. Public gatherings were not banned.

Without guidance or policy from the government, Belarusians organised what they called “the people’s quarantine”: either individuals stayed home from work, or businesses introduced work from home policies without official guidance. Lacking support from the government, dozens of local initiatives and crowdfunding efforts emerged to buy and produce medical equipment, sew protective masks and raise financial support from local and diaspora communities.

In Belarus, the pandemic utterly destroyed Lukashenko’s reputation as the controller-in-chief. Despite all his bravado, the president failed spectacularly to contain the virus. More importantly, civil society proved faster, more creative and resourceful than the state. By his very inaction, the president of Belarus unintentionally galvanized ordinary people to take action.

Andrej Stryzhak, a human rights activist and volunteer worker, co-founded the #ByCovid19 initiative to help doctors deal with the pandemic. An informal group of some 1,500 volunteers delivered personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical equipment, purchased with money raised through crowdfunding, to hospitals across the country. Private businesses contributed funds and masks. Restaurants donated food. Hotels provided rooms pro bono to medical workers.

In May, when we spoke about the initiative, Stryzhak told me he hoped the crisis would develop trust in the country’s third sector.

“I see it as gradation from dissidents to parliamentary opposition,” he said. “Even if the dissidents are being trapped, they exist. If there’s less control, they are slowly becoming civil society. Later, alternative candidates appear, after which political parties will be initiated.”

As numerous initiatives and projects exploded since then, he’s emerged from all that’s taken place in recent weeks in a distinctly optimistic mood.

“Alternative structures of society are being created at the moment. These structures, which citizens are forming themselves, will eventually take over the current dysfunctional politics,” Stryzhak says now.

The needle has indeed moved quickly.

Unprecedented solidarity

A vibrant popular movement has unfolded in the past months in Belarus. More than 100,000 rallied against Lukashenko in Minsk each of the past seven Sundays, despite detentions and police violence, insisting that his landslide re-election in August was falsified.

Unlike in previous elections, the widespread grassroots protests —the largest in the country’s history—are sustained and organized with skillful use of social media. Telegram, a social media app that often remains available even during internet outages, has become a crucial tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have swept Belarus since the election. Several channels, such as Nexta and Belarus of the Brain, have become the most popular and main tools to facilitate the protests. The crowds are coming from all walks of life. In addition to the middle class, popular public figures are joining the protests.

Among the celebrity protesters are athletes and Olympic medalists who march under the banner of the Free Union of Athletes, a newly-created movement. Nearly 600 Belarusian athletes signed an open letter demanding, among other things, new elections and an end to police violence.

The wave of solidarity and self-organization is unprecedented in this country. Strike committees have been formed at state enterprises across the country, even though police are arresting and fining workers. Students gather on university campuses to protest repression and censorship. Lecturers support them. Media outlets publish blank pages when journalists are detained. Local residents feel the pride in belonging and self-identification; nearly every neighbourhood has its own newly designed flag.

In the largest crowdfunding campaign, Belarusians have raised more than $6 million to help those who suffered from police violence and were fired for political reasons. It is a significant amount in a country where the average salary is roughly $500—and hasn’t increased in the past decade.

New values

The tide of anger and frustration with the Belarusian authorities is longstanding.

People have united in the face of blatant injustice. But why was it this particular election that proved to be the tipping point? “Now it’s different. Belarusians made a sharp leap thanks to the generational change,” says Minsk-based sociologist Alena Artsiomenka. “People who grew up in the post-Perestroika era are more inclined to contribute to the society’s well-being. Those who were brought up in more stable and safe conditions are more interested in post-materialistic values.”

Technology has been essential to the movement’s growth. Crowdfunding platforms made philanthropy easier. But this is no longer considered desirable. The work of one such platform, MolaMola, came to a halt after the government shut it down. It was launched by Lukashenko’s main rival’s son, Eduard Babariko, who has been under arrest since June. The same platform was used to collect money during the pandemic and previously for civil society projects that were not related to politics.

Mikita Mikado felt a desire for revenge, too, after police raided the Minsk office of PandaDoc and arrested four of the company's managers. The government subsequently blocked the company’s accounts. In order to save his employees in Belarus, Mikado left the project Protect Belarus. But this did not halt the initiative.

The state’s use of violence against protesters has proved to be not only a breakthrough in the way people think about the authorities— and the Belarusian public’s reaction against police brutality— but also in the way they see many realms of day-to-day life.

Belarusians have been moving away from the paternalistic culture that was the tradeoff for economic stability during the post-Soviet period. In recent years, local communities managed to preserve a historic district that was slated for demolition. Residents also protested against the construction of a plant that would pollute their environment. Belarusians have long been associated with a strong paternalistic culture. This began changing in the recent years —people took matters into their own hands.

The 2020 demonstrations are not without precedent. In 2017, ordinary citizens rocked the country with widespread protests against a tax on the unemployed, a bizarre plan that would have forced those who do not officially work to pay a penalty to the state. Injustice was the main driving force for the protests; the same is true of the current protests. In response to the 2017 protests, Lukashenko initially agreed to impose a ban on the tax—only to reintroduce it at a later date. He might not have changed in the intervening years, but the country has. Belarusian society had for years seen the trust of ordinary people in one another drain away. Now it has found a unifying crucible in its resistance to violence. Self-organizing and helping one another became fundamental. A nation’s new, yet old, encounter with its autocratic leader may not be finished yet. But there is little to no chance that Belarusians will submit any longer to Lukashenko's authoritarian regime.
    [post_title] => Belarus's protests are fueled by an unprecedented civil society movement
    [post_excerpt] => For years, Belarus’s rapidly expanding IT industry coexisted with Lukashenko’s government, keeping out of politics while benefiting from preferential tax rates and little regulation. The rigged August 9 election proved to be a tipping point.
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Belarus’s protests are fueled by an unprecedented civil society movement

by Hanna Liubakova

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    [post_date] => 2020-10-01 20:06:59
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    [post_content] => The balance between a commitment to free speech and a means of preventing online abuse is elusive.

A few weeks ago, while scrolling Twitter, I came across a brewing controversy about the Netflix film Cuties, about a young girl from a conservative Muslim family in a Parisian banlieue who becomes involved with a dance crew. While director Maïmouna Doucouré—who is French-Senagalese just like the film’s protagonist—has said that the film is “sounding an alarm” about the all-too-early sexualization of girls (partly) through social media, its critics—many of whom seemed not to have seen the film—immediately objected, essentially accusing Doucouré of creating softcore porn and petitioning for the film to be removed.

Janice Turner, a columnist for The Times who is known for her “gender critical” stance, wrote a particularly scathing review of the film. In it, she conflated Cuties with the work of a charity that had, weeks earlier, put out a call for queer black youth in the U.K. to respond to a survey asking about their age, sexuality, location, and vulnerability of housing. The call, claimed Turner, violated safeguards intended to protect children’s privacy.

Turner’s critics, myself included, saw the piece as an attempt to paint the charity as sexualizing children. The sub-hed of her column stated so plainly: “Attempts to sexualise minors are always wrong but a vocal minority of gay campaigners twist concern into prejudice.”

I tweeted at Turner, accusing her of seeing sexualization where it didn’t exist, but she refused to engage on that point, repeatedly deflecting and implying that I didn’t care about safeguarding. I gave up shortly thereafter, but her followers did not: For hours after our brief exchange, they attacked me from just about every angle you can imagine.

There was a handful of reasonable comments that brought up the issue of safeguarding, but most were overtly transphobic: My attackers denied the existence of trans individuals, stated that children have no conception of gender, and implied those who are trans are simply insane. One person called me “batshit crazy,” while another accused me of having told trans people that “suicide is their only alternative to life-limiting drugs.”

Later, when I tweeted about the controversy around Cuties, one of Turner’s lackeys assumed I was a trans woman (presumably because I include “she/her” pronouns in my bio, which is a simple reflection of my gender identity) and began harassing me, calling me a man. Then that person’s followers began harassing me, in public and in DMs. I closed my laptop and curled up with a book.

***

This was not my first experience with online harassment. I am, after all, a woman on the internet—and a public one at that. Public critique for my political views (most often fair) has sometimes resulted in brigading by the critic's followers; I’ve at times spent entire weekends offline, avoiding Twitter and waiting for the controversy to blow over, as it almost always does.

But this was different. For the first time, I experienced firsthand the kind of outrageous abuse that seems to follow transgender individuals wherever they go online. The next day, I logged back in and tweeted about my experience: “Someone on this hellsite mistook me for a trans woman last night and I got brigaded for a bit (thank you, block button), and holy shit I don't know how y'all deal with that all the time what the fuck.”

That tweet received nearly 2,500 likes and retweets and dozens of comments both public and private. Trans followers confirmed that my one-off experience was their daily reality. One person called it “living in hell.” Others shared their tactics (“block early, block often”) and their solidarity.

I was in the midst of finishing the final edits on a book that covers a number of issues related to free speech and social media, so the topic of harassment had been on my mind. But now I began to reflect more deeply on positions I had taken in the past, on my own experiences, and how those two things interacted.

I was raised in New England to be tough and stoic. I didn’t talk much about my emotions growing up, nor did I feel the need. Then, soon after arriving at a university where I knew no one, I went through a breakup that threw me into a major depressive episode, unable to get out of bed. I tried calling my close friends, who were at other universities, but eventually they got sick of my late-night crying jags. I saw the university psychiatrist, who sent me home with pills after talking to me for just five minutes. They didn’t help, but eventually I found my way out of that depression.

From there on out, I was Teflon: I didn’t let anything stick. My hard-won ability to slough off criticism gave me the confidence to work toward my goals but I still struggled, financially and otherwise. I decided that, in order to get ahead, I had to tuck my emotions away.

By the time I became well-known for my work, my belief in free expression was near-absolute. The experiences that had led me to take this position were noble: the state-sanctioned murder of a blogger I’d been emailing with in Iran; the arrest of a friend in Tunisia, then another in Egypt and one in Syria; and helping people I knew through the asylum process in the United States.

For a while, free expression was my religion. I studied government censorship and, later, the role of social media companies in governing our speech. I became one of the first experts on content moderation, and among the first to suggest that perhaps corporations aren’t the best arbiters of speech. For a long time, that stance felt unimpeachable. And then Gamergate happened.

Gamergate, for readers who may not be aware, was a 2014 online harassment campaign. At first it targeted women in the gaming industry who had spoken up about sexism and misogyny in their field, but later it broadened to target loads of other women. Many say that it was a precursor, or an early warning, of the alt-right brigading we see online every day now.

I ignored it at first. I was in Australia to give a series of talks; upon my return to San Francisco, I had two weeks to vacate my apartment and move to Berlin. It was not an easy time (there was plenty else going on beneath the surface that I’ll save for an eventual memoir). Since my colleagues were following Gamergate, I allowed myself to block out both the phenomenon and the feelings that the incident raised for me. Eventually, I was asked to comment and—still not having quite caught up on the details—I did, deflecting to talk about the importance of not allowing the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world to define acceptable speech. I argued that what we really needed were better tools that would enable users to control their own experiences.

Over time, I recognized that I hadn’t given the victims of Gamergate their due. I focused harder on looking for solutions that would both preserve free expression and ensure that harassers—and the pain and silencing they cause to those they target—wouldn’t be tolerated. But I did so quietly, behind the scenes, unsure of what to say. I knew that the tech companies’ failure to take action was partly due to my prior statements on free speech.

This latest incident over Cuties brought my previous missteps into clear focus. I still believe, as I write in my upcoming book, that corporations have far too much power over our speech, and that we, the people, should have the ultimate say in what is or is not acceptable expression. At the same time, I now understand that too many of us—on all sides—treat our perspectives as religion. We are dogmatic and inflexible.

What I realized from the brigading I experienced a few weeks ago, and the conversations that took place in its aftermath, is that we must always remember to be compassionate. This is important not just for others but for ourselves as well. I now realize that part of the reason I once found it so difficult to express compassion for victims of harassment was that I was burying my own feelings, and thus couldn’t empathize with people who lacked my ability to grow a thick skin. I could intellectualize the harm of harassment, which I most certainly recognized as harm, but I found it nearly impossible to put myself in others’ shoes.

Some of my well-known critics have themselves experienced intense harassment. And yet, they too have taken an approach that feels a lot like bullying—or at least punching down. To be sure, public figures should be criticized when they say something awful, particularly when they have the privilege of access to a massive platform like the New York Times Opinion page (I am thinking of the notoriously thin-skinned columnist Bret Stephens, but there are many like him). But we should also be careful to remember the humanity of others—especially when they’re willing to engage in discussion about or account for their mistakes.

When it comes to harassment online and what to do about it, I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I do know: We need to listen to people when they are describing their lived experience. This is particularly true of queer and trans individuals, and people of color. We need to think about holistic solutions that start with education. We need to teach people how to stick up for victims, and how to help them fight back. And we must create better tools and architecture that pre-empt those who would engage in harassment and brigading.

I am fine with booting serial harassers off social media platforms, but we also need to be careful about any solutions that fail to consider free expression. In my experience, companies all too often come at harassment with a hammer, whacking not only those who are causing real harm, but also those who are engaging in counter-speech, or sharing their experiences while quoting their harassers. This is harmful too, and we should not accept it as a reasonable tradeoff.

There are many partial solutions, but we must be wary of anyone who claims to have a silver bullet; and while there are many worthy ideas out there, each has significant tradeoffs. Nor can we simply ignore harassment or wish it away. Our societies are increasingly divided, a fact that leads to more vitriol, more anger, and more hate. Social media is part of the problem, but it isn’t the whole problem. What we need is to take the holistic view, to see that social media, its architecture and design, maximize controversy for profit, and that there will never be a technological solution to stop online hate and harassment, because it is rooted not in code, but in human behavior. We cannot separate “real life” from “online." And so, whatever approach we take to combat that which ails us must be rooted in compassion.

 
    [post_title] => The struggle to combat cyber bullying begins with compassion
    [post_excerpt] => Corporations do have far too much power over our speech. At the same time, too many people—on all sides—present their perspective as religion. They are dogmatic and inflexible.
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The struggle to combat cyber bullying begins with compassion

by Jillian C. York

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    [post_content] => After years of shallow coverage, legacy media in the U.S. are finally engaging critically with white evangelical ideology. Read part one of this three-part series on the trajectory of the Christian Right; and part two.

The would-be respectable evangelical elite, which includes Beltway-based media analysts and political lobbyists who rose to power under the Reagan and Bush presidencies, have positioned themselves as Never Trumpers. But they have failed to take responsibility for their role in waging the culture wars that led to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency and subsequent consolidation of power, which happened largely on the back of the Christian Right’s unswerving support. And while majorities of all white Christian demographics voted for Trump in 2018, white evangelicals led the pack and remain America’s most Trumpist demographic.

While elite evangelicals like Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson, and David French all find Donald Trump a bridge too far, they have long supported the kind of Christian schooling that serves to indoctrinate children in patriarchal and anti-LGBTQ views, toxic purity culture, Christian nationalist history, young earth creationism, and right-wing political ideology. They also share their rank-and-file coreligionists’ obsession with banning abortion, which has served since the late 1970s as a proxy for white supremacism, as white evangelicals and other right-wingers invested in respectability felt compelled to give up overt support for racial discrimination.

Concentrated in the Republican Party since the late 1960s, white Christian America has never had to face up to its crimes. These range from supporting slavery and Jim Crow, to supporting the war crimes committed abroad post-9/11 under the presidential administration of George W. Bush—along with complicity in a predictable spike in hate crimes against Muslims at home. More recently, they include complicity in anti-Black terrorism and support for the voter suppression and “law and order” politics that Trump is counting on to win a second term in office.

Thanks to white evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support, “respectable” evangelicals have failed to keep a lid on the quiet part of their ideology; as a result, they have begun to lose control over the image of the Christian Right in the media, which means they can no longer direct the national conversation about evangelical Christianity as effectively as they used to. Although progress in this regard has been uneven, and particularly limited in major legacy outlets, a significant shift is detectable. Even if Trump loses the election this November, I hope the presence of diverse voices and critical perspectives on evangelicalism will continue to increase in the media, so that the public can begin to deal seriously with the threat authoritarian Christianity poses to democracy and human rights.

The primary barrier to covering right-wing Christianity fairly is the legacy media’s unspoken taboo on careful, critical examination of views that prominent Christians say are the product of “sincerely held religious belief.” This lack of critical coverage allows conservative Christians to get away with insisting that they are above politics; and because reporters for cable news and major media outlets fail to challenge the claim, they reinforce the white Christian supremacism that has become such an important political force.

Like freedom of the press, religious freedom is an important First Amendment right. But when believers use their faith as a bludgeon to attack othered groups and to prevent equal accommodation of members of those groups in the public square, we have moved beyond the bounds of a truly democratic approach to pluralism.

Because white evangelicals are using their religious beliefs to mobilize politically, the media must hold them to account just as they would any political movement. Advocates of democracy and human rights must make the Christian supremacism that pervades American politics visible; this is the most effective means to reclaim a robustly democratic understanding of religious liberty from the Christian Right, which defines it as their right to impose their religious beliefs on a public that does not share them.

Since 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for the flagrantly impious Trump in 2016, journalists, pundits, and commentators have scrambled to explain why. The initial flood of commentary about white evangelical support for Trump was ill-informed, presenting the Christian Right through the lens of hypocrisy; while this criticism was shallow, it was important in that it indicated the extent to which respectable evangelicals were losing their control of the Christian Right’s media image.

Eventually, critical hashtags created by former evangelicals (including myself) like #ExposeChristianSchools and #ChurchToo garnered coverage in outlets like New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press.  Liz Kineke, a religion journalist, produced Deconstructing My Religion, a documentary about ex-evangelicals for CBS Religion (I appear in the film).

More recently, New York Times religion reporter Elizabeth Dias wrote: “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” An evangelical herself, Dias has a history of uncritical, positive coverage of white evangelicals, so it is remarkable to read her critical assessment of white evangelicals in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, even if that assessment was framed very similarly to the introduction of a recent book on right-wing Christianity and gender that Dias failed to cite.

Bradley Onishi, an ex-evangelical who is Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and host of the podcast “Straight White American Jesus” (full disclosure: I have been a repeat guest), told The Conversationalist that the media still has a tendency to give disproportionate coverage to evangelicals who are critical of Trump, which he sees as “a reticence on the part of legacy outlets to be fully critical of white Christians.” He added: “We have it baked into our ether that they are good, wholesome, moral Americans who are the backbone of the country.”

Instead of exploring “the ways white evangelicals are entangled with white supremacists, white nationalists, homegrown terrorists, militias, and other anti-democratic groups,” prominent outlets take pains to represent evangelicals as largely benign, said Onishi. In his view, ex-evangelicals should be given far more media time. They know better than anyone “how and why white evangelicals became the most extreme religious group in the country when it comes to immigration, race, reproductive rights, and religious liberty.” I agree completely, because I believe in the power of stories to change minds.

The American media’s increasingly critical coverage of white evangelicals, however incomplete, has coincided with the rapid growth of the non-religious population. The latter has been driven by the Christian Right’s culture wars, which would seem to be at the root of much of the asymmetric polarization the United States has undergone in recent years. Just as Christian nationalists are concentrated in the Republican Party, a large majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to vote for Democrats. Secular Democrats could help change the ways Americans discuss religion and pluralism; and the more the party recognizes them, the more likely we are to see such changes.

Many secular Democrats are frustrated at the heavy emphasis the Democratic National Committee places on trying to reach white Christians, the vast majority of whom will certainly vote for Trump again this year. But the Democrats have recently taken some serious steps toward embracing the nonreligious vote. These include the DNC’s 2019 Resolution 38, which recognizes the contributions of nonreligious Americans, and the appointment of Sarah Levin, formerly of Secular Coalition for America, as co-chair of the DNC’s Interfaith Council. Levin deserves much credit for pushing the DNC to include secular voters, which could create a positive feedback loop with the press that will further weaken respectable evangelicals’ control of their movement’s narrative.

Levin told The Conversationalist that the rot at the core of conservative evangelicalism “has been exposed to a new level in the eyes of everyday Americans,” who now see clearly “what it looks like when a narrow set of beliefs is privileged, when religious liberty is weaponized to undermine civil rights, when patriotic pluralism is replaced with Christian nationalism, and [how it affects] our foreign policy.”

The disastrous impact on American democracy of an empowered Christian Right could easily, as Levin points out, have been predicted. Many secularists are ex-evangelicals who know white evangelical subculture intimately have been sounding alarm bells for years; they should be part of the national conversation. The lesson of the Trump years could and should be that if the media learns, with the help of ex-evangelicals, to cover the danger of Christian nationalism accurately, it could make possible a healthier democratic future in the United States of America.
    [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism, part 3
    [post_excerpt] => In the third of a three-part series about the trajectory of Christian nationalism to its current powerful position, the author looks at the media's failure to engage critically with white evangelical ideology.
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The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism, part 3

by Chrissy Stroop

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