To help readers navigate this pivotal election, RD is collaborating with PRA’s research team to provide short, timely posts, with a special emphasis on far-right organizing and election interference—including intimidation at the polls, efforts to prevent certification, and the mobilization of violence. Check back regularly for the latest on our Special Coverage page—and catch up on all RD coverage leading up to the election here. On Monday aftern…
To help readers navigate this pivotal election, RD is collaborating with PRA’s research team to provide short, timely posts, with a special emphasis on far-right organizing and election interference—including intimidation at the polls, efforts to prevent certification, and the mobilization of violence. Check back regularly for the latest on our Special Coverage page—and catch up on all RD coverage leading up to the election here. On election day,…
To help readers navigate this pivotal election, RD is collaborating with PRA’s research team to provide short, timely posts, with a special emphasis on far-right organizing and election interference—including intimidation at the polls, efforts to prevent certification, and the mobilization of violence. Check back regularly for the latest on our Special Coverage page—and catch up on all RD coverage leading up to the election here. Twenty four hour…
…s and America’s interests do not always coincide and to then argue how the United States, influenced by the Israel lobby, has acted against those interests in its support of Israel. Whether this is true in practice or not is not the point here. My point is simply to suggest that the United States has often acted as if these interests were identical (and groups like AIPAC lobby the administration to think that way), resulting in behavior which show…
…ind him. He holds in his right hand a ghostly “Q+” (according to some, the code name Trump himself uses when he posts on Q message boards) and the text reads “The World Will Soon Understand/Nothing Can Stop What is Coming,” a direct reference to “The Storm.” As I wrote back in 2020: The QAnoners’ apocalypse, unsurprisingly, is one of political partisan violence, culminating in “The Storm,” when all of the so-called “deep state leaders” will be arr…
…l codes. Tunisia’s anti-sodomy laws are derived from the 1913 French Penal Code, while section 347 of the penal code in Christian Cameroon is a French colonial law. Similarly, the Ottoman adoption of French codes would ban the köçek. Across the Muslim world, many of the laws criminalizing LGBTQ+ people are direct relics of colonial law. It would take generations to gradually align the region with European colonial sexual values through a shift in…
…ions, fostering an uncritically positive version of Christian history, and promoting the idea that the United States is an essentially Christian nation. This year’s streamlining process—officially described as an effort to “produce fewer and clearer standards that are teachable in the time allotted without diluting the rigor of the standards”—constitutes the first revision of the social studies TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, often pro…
…gion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example, has been a “failed state” since 1991; this is a place where the presence of the state and accompanying service provision is virtually nonexistent. Griswold shows how the story of the rise of al-Shabaab—an Islamist militia currently wreaking havoc with horrific efficacy across Somalia and now outside its borders (the group claimed resp…
…real terrible situations. Just look at Chechnya, Indonesia, Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Iran—countries where homosexuality is illegal, where gay people are put to death. It’s absolutely crucial that we work on these dire places, and help gay refugees, and push for decriminalization of homosexuality, and so on. All that work is extremely important and should not be lost in the shuffle. But it’s also important that we get rule-of-law countries where they…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…But the center is an assertion, not a fact; an etiquette, not a place. Its code, its theology, is most fully embodied in Americanized Arminianism—a Protestant tradition of good works and propriety, “distinguished liberals” and polite realpolitik. “Arminian moralism,” notes historian Charles Sellers in his study of Finney’s age, The Market Revolution, “sanctioned competitive individualism and the market’s rewards of wealth and status.” It did not e…
