All posts tagged: conservative movement

The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin

The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin

Published by skeptic

For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow. But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist. The right …

Richard Hanania and the Allure of Racist Pseudoscience

Richard Hanania and the Allure of Racist Pseudoscience

Published by skeptic

The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote a tribute to Sarah Palin in 2009, gushing that her candidacy had made the “ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.” (There’s a lot going on there.) “White nationalism,” Hanania wrote as “Hoste,” is “the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.” Two days after Mathias’s story, Hanania responded, stating, “Over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.” He rejected Mathias’s characterization of his “creepy obsession with so-called race science” as “dishonest,” …

They Are Still With Him

They Are Still With Him

Published by skeptic

Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday, offers a detailed recounting of Trump’s effort to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power,” using as pretext claims of voter fraud that Trump knew were false—in the words of one of his advisers, “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” In addition to simply making unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, which is irresponsible but protected as free speech, Trump and his advisers hatched one bizarre plan after another to illegitimately seize power by overturning the election. If you’re trying to understand how, despite all of this, Trump could still be president again, you need look no further than the reactions of his primary rivals and …

Alabama Is Defying the Supreme Court on Voting Rights

Alabama Is Defying the Supreme Court on Voting Rights

Published by skeptic

Supreme Court rulings are meant to be the law of the land, but Alabama is taking its recent opinion on the Voting Rights Act as a mere recommendation. In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district. Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander. Read: A Supreme Court ruling that could tip the House More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, …

The Book That Broke Judaism—And Tried to Put It Back Together

The Book That Broke Judaism—And Tried to Put It Back Together

Published by skeptic

In the early 1970s, American Jews were, on the whole, centrist and conventional. Most were married, and most to other Jews. Their largest religious denomination was the Conservative movement, with its bland, spacious suburban synagogues, representing the middle ground between fusty tradition and full-forced reform. This was a community that seemed to have settled into a comfortable status quo, steadily assimilating in the postwar years and ascending into the middle class. Still, there were signs that when it came to actual religious practice, a younger generation, coming of age during the 1960s, found this stability stultifying. The desire for change could be felt bubbling from below. In 1972, the first female rabbi was ordained. Two-thirds of Jews under 30 belonged to no synagogue at all. But in cities such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., groups of young, well-educated Jews had begun informally worshiping and studying together, eschewing institutional supervision and their parents’ conformity. At one such communal gathering, known as Havurat Shalom, just outside Boston, three 20-somethings decided to produce a religious book …