Recommended Reading: The New and Awful Normal
The Week's Recommended Reading on Substack: Jared Yates Sexton, Tal Lavin, Noah Berlatsky, Judd Legum, Jim Wallis, Brian Kaylor, and Pete Kurtz-Glovas.
The Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:
Jared Yates Sexton writes that “this is the America that many of us warned was coming. An attention-less dystopia unable to reckon with itself and filled with people so radicalized by Republican conspiracy theories they’re willing to pick up a hammer and attempt to brain the husband of Nancy Pelosi in order to get to her.”
Tal Lavin writes that “the thing about the second coming of Jesus, as imagined by many fundamentalist evangelicals, is that, when you get down to it, it all … depends … on the Jews. The Jews in Israel in particular. That’s why Trump gave that big sloppy kiss of an encomium to evangelical Christian Zionists recently, noting how grateful they all are about his support for Israel.”
Noah Berlatsky writes that “as the GOP has become less apologetically fascist in the Trump years, though, guardrails against antisemitism on the right have come down. What remains is increasingly just lip service — and even the lip service is antisemitic.”
Judd Legum writes that “the apparent assassination attempt follows more than a decade of personal and unrelenting attacks against Pelosi. In 2010, Republicans launched a ‘Fire Pelosi’ project which featured ‘images of [Pelosi] engulfed in Hades-style flames.’ Things escalated from there.”
Kristin Du Mez writes that “There is no set definition of ‘Christian nationalism’ that everyone agrees on and employs in the same way. There are people who check all the Christian nationalist boxes but disavow the term. There are those who champion ‘Christian America’ but in a way that fully aligns with democratic norms and institutions. There are those who would gladly subvert democracy to achieve their ends. In assessing Christian nationalism, we need to retain sight of these distinctions.”
Jim Wallis writes that “In states across the country, trained activists and even armed vigilantes are planning to aggressively challenge voters in poor black and brown neighborhoods. Why? Because they’re not the ‘right kind’ of Americans. They are not white Americans.”
Brian Kaylor writes that “as the congregation stands and claps for a partisan attack on Biden, vaccines, or liberals, it likely encourages George to rant more in his next sermon. They’re radicalizing each other within their echo chamber. It’s bad enough in partisan media, but this babbling of pagans is even worse when it takes over a sanctuary.”
Pete Kurtz-Glovas writes that “for weeks experts on extremism warned that allowing [Gavin] McInnes to speak on campus would end badly. The concern was motivated by his reputation for hate speech, the high potential for violence at his speaking engagements, and the violent actions of the Proud Boys on January 6th, 2021.”