Новости за 11.01.2021

The Trump-incited insurrection at the Capitol on Wednesday was a fitting coda to a presidency that came into this world likening Mexicans to “criminals and rapists” and that has, along the way, accepted and enabled white supremacists to a degree unprecedented in recent history. The president’s legacy is stained by the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, the El Paso terrorist attack, and the Kenosha shooting. The angry mob that stormed the Capitol—waving Trump signs and Confederate flags, wearing... Читать дальше...

Last week, in the wake of the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote a story about an Air Force pilot turned extremist who was photographed during the maelstrom wearing combat gear on the Senate floor. The article, which named the man as retired Lt. Col. Larry Brock, struck familiar notes about a MAGA fan steeped in disinformation whose Manichaean enthusiasm for the president spurred him to travel to the nation’s capital and participate in what amounted to a violent, failed insurrection. Читать дальше...

Last week, amid the chaos of the Capitol riot, the Trump administration proceeded with plans to sell off chunks of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the gas and oil industry’s highest bidders. The plan had been in the works for years, and while Congress was still under siege by fervent Trump supporters, the Bureau of Land Management opened the auction—with embarrassing results.

Let’s get something straight. The press and many of our leaders have converged upon an implicit consensus that last Wednesday should be understood as the nadir of the Trump era—as a tipping point illustrating, for either the first or the most significant time, the deadly potential of his antics and rhetoric. They are wrong. In October 2018, a gunman animated by theories about migrant caravans which the president had promoted walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 people. Less than a year later... Читать дальше...

Over the past 60 years, two inaugural addresses, in particular, have left a lasting impression on Democratic oratory. In 1961, John Kennedy embodied the spirit of Cold War patriotism with his ringing, verb-first declarations (“Ask not what your country...”) and explicit generational appeal (“The torch has been passed...”). That speech, which liberals of a certain age can almost recite by heart, represents one pole of Democratic rhetoric. The other, of course, comes from Barack Obama, whose sinuous... Читать дальше...

I am trying to cope with anti-democratic social collapse during a pandemic by reading local news stories about the people who stormed the Capitol. There was the remorseful CEO from the Chicago suburbs—“In a moment of extremely poor judgment … I followed hundreds of others through an open set of doors to the Capitol building”—and the son of a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, wrapped in fur and a bullet proof vest, seen in photos carrying a police riot shield because he “found it on the floor.”

“But just remember this: you’re smarter, you’re stronger, you’ve got more going than anybody, and they try and demean everybody having to do with us.”—Donald Trump, January 6, 2021

On the evening of February 16, 1961, 19-year-old Wilbert Rideau found himself at a loose end. He’d missed the bus after finishing work in his hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and couldn’t get a ride home with friends until later that night. Dawdling around bus stops alone was dangerous for a Black man. He decided, on a whim, to rob a local bank. “When would an opportunity like this occur again?” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, In the Place of Justice:  A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. “The prospect of failure... Читать дальше...