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Trump and Hindu Nationalism: A Match Made in Bollywood

By Andrea R. Jain

…-Hindus, and especially Muslims, to the status of second-class citizens at best—and, more commonly, to members of a terrorist religion. Trump’s speech at the RHC event was situated within a context rife with Islamophobic and Hindu nationalist symbolism. There were fliers portraying President of the current opposition party in India, the Indian National Congress party, Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton as horned demons on a “witch hunt” to “get Modi…

Lincoln, Clinton, and Trump: From Strategy to Spin to Straight-Up Bullshit

By Martin Jay

…The second difference between Clinton’s and Trump’s approach to mendacity deals with the very nature of lying itself. The fundamental structure of the speech act we call lying involves four distinct features: (1) the speaker knows or thinks he knows the truth. (2) He or she utters a deliberate falsehood, asserting the opposite of what he or she knows to be the case. (3) This false utterance is performatively designed to persuade the listener that…

Trump’s “Muslim Ban” A Gift to Terrorists

By Ali Olomi

…s essential to provoke America into a civilizational conflict. ISIS is, at best, a regional threat, but it has global aspirations. Through the use of terrorism, it can extend its reach and provoke fear and hatred in far more powerful countries. Terrorism is a political strategy. Our fixation on religion blinds us to its strategic use. Banning Muslims is exactly what ISIS has hoped to achieve for many years. Propaganda from ISIS regularly decries t…

Mark Twain’s Blasphemy

By Michael A. Elliott

…ult to recall what an unlikely candidate the novel is for that office. “It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality,” reads the pronouncement of a member of the infamous Concord (Massachusetts) Library Committee, which banned the book from its shelves shortly after its publication. Ever the shrewd opportunist, Mark Twain seized upon the free publicity, calling it a “tip-top puff” in a letter to a nephew. Americans have mad…

Pastor David Brooks, Your Sermons Are Growing Stale…

By Peter Laarman

…ed nation that seems to have lost its way. We are proud that your new book deals explicitly with religious themes. You have been leaning in this direction for a long time, and we are glad to see you make your conviction that good religion is essential to good living ever more explicit. Your own intense and transformative religious experience shines through these pages, and we will never disparage the validity of any experience of the sacred. But w…

Convicted Wall Street Con Artist Finds New Target: Gays

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…dishonest present-day work with the ex-gay industry. Whether it was shady deals on Wall Street or shading the truth on gay issues, Goldberg is someone who lacks credibility and can’t be trusted,” Besen said in a press release. It’s more bad news for the “ex-gay” industry that has, for years, sought to make money, and headlines, selling a “cure” for homosexuality. Denounced by the American Psychological Association, the movement relies on question…

Debt Peonage Update: Making Home Unaffordable

By Peter Laarman

…The government offers financial incentives to loan servicers that will cut deals with borrowers to reduce monthly payments. Recently the terms of the program were liberalized to allow more borrowers to qualify, and this week the White House made a big show of questioning mortgage company execs about the extremely small number of loans that have actually been modified to date. What we’ve all been hearing is that the pace of refinancing is slow beca…

Capricology: Week 3: Apotheosis, Anyone?

By Salman Hameed

…acts, knew our interests, and just made sure that things worked out in our best interests. Of course, I don’t know what to do with the mixed tech we see in Caprica, where the rich families have a robo-butler and the police are still using VHS tapes. Do our own contemporary police and security forces really store records on videotape or do they create digital records? Diane asks about the representations of the news media in this week’s episode. Th…

Sharbat Gula’s Experience Exemplifies the ‘White Savior’ Lens Through Which Most Americans View Afghanistan

By Sara Kamali

…teve McCurry, and the media broadly, profit through money, accolades, book deals, and more jobs, while their very human subjects continue to suffer, often remaining nameless and untraceable. Like McCurry’s exploitation of Sharbat Gula and profiting disproportionately from the rights of her image, many members of the international community—the United States’ white military industrial complex and White Feminist Majority in particular—have regarded…

Romney: “A Life Balanced Between Fear and Greed”?

By Joanna Brooks

…ile, and sometimes by, outsourcing and destroying jobs, at times financing deals through “leveraged buyouts” that added substantially to the debts of companies trying to stay afloat. One source close to the GOP candidate told the Globe that Romney’s was “a life balanced between fear and greed.” The stories led Washington Post columnist James Downie to ask Monday what Romney’s business-world strategy would mean for the American economy. Who are the…