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During the Donald Trump era, AT&T endured repeated shots from the president for its acquisition and ownership of CNN the cable news network he and his supporters regularly labeled as fake news.

Not even a year after a White House changing of the guard, the Dallas-based telecommunications giant is in the political culture wars crosshairs again. This time, its Democratic and moderate Republican activists taking aim at its financial support for burgeoning right-wing extremism in the U.S.

The ire stems from newly surfaced court testimony and records suggesting right-wing broadcast network One America News Network wouldnt exist without AT&Ts backing.

A week into the festering controversy, AT&Ts only public comment is a prepared statement to The Dallas Morning News.

AT&T has never had a financial interest in OANs success and does not fund OAN, the statement said in part. CNN is the only news network we fund because its a part of AT&T.

For a company that traces its history to Alexander Graham Bells invention of the telephone in 1876, its an uncomfortable spotlight thats only widened since the OAN revelation.

In the week following the Reuters report, the hashtag #BoycottATT harnessed mostly by democratic political organizations has reached 2.5 million users via hundreds of posts on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms, according to social media research firm Brandmentions.

OAN, the cable network owned by Robert Herring Sr., garnered frequent praise from Trump for its adoring coverage of his presidency. Its also been accused of spreading conspiracy theories, debunked lies about the outcome of the 2020 election and about the COVID-19 pandemic thats taken the lives of 722,000 Americans. In June, OAN anchor Pearson Sharp falsely claimed Democrats stole the election from Trump and suggested executing those responsible.

The OAN controversy is rooted in AT&Ts strategic shift into the world of media.

It embarked on a series of deals in the mid-2010s aimed at morphing its business from one that simply controls wired and wireless infrastructure into a modern media company that brings consumers entertainment and news content.

That played out during Randall Stephensons tenure as CEO. Now, his successor John Stankey is tasked with unraveling the multibillion-dollar deals that brought satellite cable provider DirecTV and Time Warner under its corporate umbrella and returning the company to its telecom roots.

The Reuters report, titled How AT&T helped build far-right One America News, cites 2019 testimony from OAN owner Herring in a court case unrelated to AT&T. He said AT&T executives were the inspiration for creating the network in 2013.

They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [left wing] side, Herring said in a court deposition, according to the report.

OAN was being carried on AT&Ts U-Verse TV service when the company, ready to enter the world of media in a larger way, announced its intent to acquire DirecTV. Herring sued over concerns AT&T would migrate its U-Verse customers over to DirecTV, which didnt carry OAN.

AT&T eventually settled with OAN. According to Herring, the deal provided OAN with tens of millions of dollars over a five-year period, and a considerable platform on DirecTV for the nascent network to reach U.S. households.

The fees earned from OANs contract with AT&T-owned television platforms provide the network with 90% of its revenue, according to Reuters, citing statements made under oath by OANs accountant.

At one point shortly after the network launched, AT&T even attempted to buy a 5% stake in Herrings company, Reuters found.

Basically AT&T, at the time, came to them and dangled a real serious business partnership, Angelo Carusone, CEO of progressive media watchdog group Media Matters, said on MSNBC.

One was possibly investing and buying a chunk of the company, but the more tantalizing thing was to say, Well guarantee you enough revenue that even if you dont get commercials, even if you have almost no viewers, you will still be a profitable company as long as you exist and take this deal.

In its statement, AT&T downplayed its role in boosting the network.

When we acquired DirecTV, Herring pressured us for months to carry OAN. We rejected their offer and in response, Herring Networks sued us, claiming we deliberately intended to injure Herring. Only as part of the settlement of that lawsuit did DirecTV consent to a commercial carriage agreement with OAN four years ago.

But the fees committed to OAN in the carriage deal would have been about 18 times the market value at the time, Carusone said, referring to it as outrageously high. Reuters characterizes the relationship with AT&T as lucrative for OAN.

AT&T wasnt alone in wanting a piece of the network.

Roughly 10 months prior to the 2020 election, OANs growing importance in far-right political circles garnered the interest of conservatives across the country.

Led by a Dallas-based private equity arm of Hicks Holdings the Dallas family office of Tom Hicks, father of Republican National Committee co-chair Tommy Hicks Jr. Hicks Equity Partners was interested in making a bid for the network. That deal never materialized.

Marc Ambinder, a senior fellow at the University of Southern Californias Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership and Policy, described AT&Ts agreement to carry the network as a reflection of AT&Ts realization that right-wing eyeballs mean big money.

On Friday, Herring spoke out for the first time, describing the Reuters investigation as a biased hit piece and disputing the testimony from OANs own accountant about AT&Ts carriage fees making up 90% of the companys funding.

I wish it was [true], he said in an interview with his network. AT&T pays us a very small amount compared to what they pay other channels. We do get enough that we can survive on.

Herring said AT&T has never told the network what to broadcast.

All the people that are on the other side theyre all trying to get rid of us, Herring said. Were making some changes in America, and were going to keep doing that.

In August, AT&T completed a deal to spin off its TV and streaming business, including DirecTV, into a separate company it will co-manage with private equity group TPG Capital. AT&T said the new company is overseen by its own board of directors, where AT&T has non-controlling and equal representation with TPG.

The decision of whether to renew the OAN carriage agreement upon its expiration will be up to DirecTV, which is now a separate, independent company outside of AT&T, the company said in its statement. AT&T retained a 70% ownership stake in DirecTV.

But with a controversial Texas legislature continuing to push new laws, like those that limit the rights of LGBTQ Texans, the pressure on AT&T could stick around.

On Texas restrictive new abortion legislation, AT&T responded to its critics by saying it has never taken a position on the issue of abortion.

AT&T did not endorse nor support passage of Senate Bill 8 in the Texas legislature. AT&Ts employee political action committees have never based contribution decisions on a legislators positions on the issue of abortion, and employee PAC contributions to Texas legislators went to both opponents and supporters of Senate Bill 8, the company said in the statement.

But activists think one of Texas biggest corporate citizens should take a stand on abortion and other issues. Nonpartisan watchdog group Accountable.US called on AT&T to stand by its stated public values and condemn partisan redistricting by Texas Republicans.

Silence is complicity at this point. Especially in a state that theyve made their headquarters, American Bridges vice president of strategic communications Julie McClain-Downey said.

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Caught in the crosshairs: AT&T political donations, deal with OAN draw it into culture wars - The Dallas Morning News

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LETTER: Gruden the victim of our one-sided culture wars - Las Vegas Review-Journal

Julian Coman carefully outlines the current tensions in the Tory party between orthodox Thatcherites and a more interventionist right (Labour, take note: Boris Johnson is redefining modern Conservatism, 12 October). As the Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie puts it, for the Tories post-Brexit, the magnetism of national sovereignty has finally overtaken the magnetism of freemarkets.

Coman argues that this shift heralds a return to the one-nation Conservatism of the Harold Macmillan era, reinvigorating neglected traditions in the Tory party. Yet the version of the 2020s is very different. The political significance of the shift from neoliberal economics to national populism is that it enables Conservatives to appeal to workers with an apparent anti-capitalist message, challenging the iniquities of foreign capital and calling for bosses to pay higher wages.

This is combined with a powerful dose of nationalism and social conservatism, shown most persistently in the frequency with which Conservatives attack anti-racism campaigns.

Culture wars are at the heart of Boris Johnsons project. He sees them as the glue to keep his electoral coalition together. Thus, while Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell from his shadow cabinet for the infamous rivers of blood speech, Johnson backs Priti Patel as she demonises refugees and condemns the England football team for taking the knee. The progressive response to the changes that Coman charts should be more economic intervention, combined with a renewed commitment to social liberalism.Jon Bloomfield Birmingham

Have an opinion on anything youve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication.

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Culture wars are the key to Boris Johnsons success - The Guardian

Phyllis Schlafly, whose drives against abortion and female equality galvanised conservatives and helped reshape America, used to compare political campaigns to an iceberg with eight-ninths under the surface. Her army was invisible until it was required. Then it would appear out of thin air when a crucial vote was to take place, armed with horror stories about what the passage of a progressive change would entail. Ms Schlaflys rhetorical tactic was to remain reasonable-sounding, despite peddling alarming arguments, until an exasperated adversary lost their sang-froid in response. It is a playbook now, alas, being deployed against the National Trust, which looks after scores of the countrys historic houses, gardens and landscapes. After a year of weathering unfounded attacks, the charity this week broke cover to say it was facing an ideological campaign from a little-known group that it claims is trying to sow division.

Its hard to disagree. A slate of conservatives, backed by an organisation called Restore Trust (RT), is running for election for six vacant seats on the charitys 36-strong consultative council. One candidate supported by RT Stephen Green vows to take the trust back to its founding principles ... and to end its promotion of fashionable woke causes. The council is the National Trusts guardian spirit, with a say over trustee appointments. Mr Green is the leader of a Christian fundamentalist lobby group, who accuses the trusts leadership of being obsessed with LGBT issues. The vote takes place at the trusts AGM this month.

While rightwing Christianity might lend a grassroots flavour to the campaign, theres also a feel of astroturf. RTs directors include a financier who has backed a leading climate-sceptic lobby group and chairs another. It is also supported by rightwing Tory MPs. The communications strategy appears to amplify political information through confusion, and manufacture the illusion of popularity. RT claimed this year to have toppled the trusts chairman after saying that he was too woke. In fact, its motion of no confidence received just 50 signatures from the trusts 6 million members. The chair was already on his way out. The purpose appears to have been to create a bandwagon effect and the more people jump on, the harder to slow it down.

While being firm in rebutting overblown complaints, the National Trust must not lose its cool. The charity became a target after its report last year detailed the links between historic slavery and colonialism in 90 properties. The report was timely, sober and academic. It was meant to provoke discussion, but instead generated waves of often unreasonable media and political attacks. One RT-promoted council candidate complains about the trust expending energy on colonialism and the slave trade. The Conservatives have reasons to stir the pot. Voters who turned to the Tories for the first time in 2019 and more traditional Conservative voters agree on little apart from culture wars. The term culture war is too often employed when describing a campaign of racism or climate denial. But here it really does apply. The Conservatives and their allies are targeting soft-power centres to push a reactionary agenda. Its an advance that needs to be resisted.

More:
The Guardian view on the National Trust: battleground for a culture war - The Guardian

Review of Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves by Peter Mitchell (Manchester University Press, 2021)

On June 13 this year, GB News aired for the first time on British television. The presenter of the channels first broadcast was former BBC anchor Andrew Neil. Several of Neils interviews with politicians and public figures have gone viral in the past, with liberals and conservatives alike lauding the avowed Thatcherite and former editor of the Sunday Times as a paragon of journalistic integrity. A pliant political and media class has rarely interrogated his ongoing chairmanship of the Spectator magazine, one of the most hospitable outlets for far-right ideas in the UK.

The new channels backers envisaged GB News tapping into a demographic they saw as underserved by a liberal drift on the part of publicly funded media, especially the BBC. They positioned GB News as the UKs first avowedly anti-woke television channel, a direct response to social justice movements in particular, Black Lives Matter (BLM), the struggle for trans rights, and feminism.

The launch came just over a year after there were protests throughout Britain in solidarity with the global BLM movement in the wake of George Floyds murder. After the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, a long-standing cause of resentment and disgust for many Bristolians, a series of counterprotests met BLM demonstrators in towns across the country.

Hastily formed groups of patriots and defenders mobilized with the vague remit of protecting statues from desecration or direct action, despite the scant evidence that the protesters were planning any such thing. What the counterprotesters shared with GB News and its target audience was an intense resistance to the notion of decolonization, and a sense of comfort and pride in Britains imperial past. Several of these counterprotests attracted far-right political activists and resulted in violence.

Just a few months later, Andrew Neil quit the nascent channel as its ratings hit rock bottom. It would be easy to label the whole project as a flop, but wider efforts to promote such reactionary politics in Britain, with the empire as a symbol of anti-wokeness, only seem to be intensifying.

These events appeared to confirm a reading of contemporary Britain favored by the commentariat namely, that the country has become profoundly divided in terms of social attitudes, especially since the Brexit referendum of 2016. The existence of the divide is undeniable. However, there has been a spate of academically questionable work from leading political-science academics, such as Matthew Goodwin, who claim that the only way to resolve this situation is to pander to the forces of reaction.

This builds on years of faux concern in public discourse about Britains white working class. Such commentary presents the inhabitants of left behind (nearly always Northern English) postindustrial towns and cities as a homogenous block of nationalists and social reactionaries with conservative views on immigration, gender, and sexuality. Adherents of the Right and center in British politics both agree that Labours crushing 2019 election defeat in its former heartlands was confirmation of these prejudices.

The current phase of the UKs culture wars increasingly flattens out the complexities and contradictions of social class and culture in the service of rehabilitating British imperialism and its colonial endeavors. Into this ferment arrives Peter Mitchells book Imperial Nostalgia.

Mitchell draws upon his previous participation in an academic project that analyzed the everyday activities of the British Empire as a geographical assemblage in this case a vast and intricate structure of steamships, jails, territory, grammar books, memoranda, people, ideology, laws, food, files and violence. This familiarity with the administrative and cultural output of high imperialism enables Mitchell to scrutinize a series of thematic and ideological preoccupations that define the concept of imperial nostalgia.

Mitchell belongs to a cohort of left-wing authors from the northeast of England, including figures like Joe Kennedy and Alex Niven, who have sought to challenge recent depictions of the region as being irrevocably mired in the values of old-school nationalism and intolerance. Such stereotypes jump out from the work of Guardian columnist John Harris, whose insubstantial travelogues from the postindustrial North gravitate with depressing predictability toward caricatures of Northern parochialism that comfortable liberal Southerners find most appealing.

The opening chapters of the book address and define the concepts of empire and nostalgia, setting a template for the following sections, in which Mitchell returns to the contemporary terrain of traditionalist indignation in response to calls for greater diversity and equality. He refers to Svetlana Boyms excavation of the seventeenth-century Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, whose writings diagnosed nostalgia as a medical ailment and presented it as a form of melancholy. As Boym summarizes Hofers analysis:

Nostalgia operates by an associationist magic, by means of which all aspects of everyday life related to one single obsession. In this respect nostalgia was akin to paranoia, only instead of a persecution mania, the nostalgic was possessed by a mania of longing . . . rustic mothers soups, thick village milk and the folk melodies of Alpine valleys were particularly conducive to triggering a nostalgic reaction in Swiss soldiers. . . . Scots, particularly Highlanders, were known to succumb to incapacitating nostalgia when hearing the sound of the bagpipes.

Mitchells study of the theorists of nostalgia provides his baseline conception: the Greek term nostos can be read as both the physical location of a homeland and the process and journey of homecoming itself. The relationship to the past is a potential site of mourning and nostalgia, always multivocal and always messy. For Mitchell, this approach insists that the past is alive, not as a living and complex part of an ongoing present but as the only possible guide to it a fair and concise summary of British political discourse today.

This interweaving of mourning and nostalgia is one of the main drivers behind the opposition of a small number of academics in elite institutions to social justice movements on campus. They present universities as being rife with anti-British propaganda and censorious woke students. As the historian Evan Smith has pointed out, the so-called free speech crisis in universities has been a preoccupation of right-wingers for decades.

Mitchell takes on the mildly preposterous but influential figure of Nigel Biggar, who has made a name for himself as a virulent defender of Britains imperial past. Biggar is not a historian by academic training but rather a professor of moral and pastoral theology. His apologist position is rooted in deference toward the ruling-class academic institutions that he serves. Britains elite universities, after all, have historically acted as finishing schools for imperial adventurers and pipelines to government.

Biggar sees the call of the marginalized for greater recognition and representation as an existential threat to the institutions that have for so long provided a safe haven for historical and political orthodoxies. The implication is that movements for decolonization, in tandem with the influence of humanities departments supposedly overrun with Marxist academics, constitute foreign imports in both the geographical and ideological sense.

Biggar and his supporters present the firm but unfailingly calm responses of his colleagues challenging his unhistorical reading of empire as a form of bullying and as somehow uncivil. This allows the imperial nostalgists to cast themselves as the truly marginalized figures in modern life. As Mitchell notes, this rhetorical technique is as cowardly as it is transparent.

One illuminating chapter looks at Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP who has sought to present himself as the new face of muscularly liberal, one-nation conservatism. Stewarts imperial archetype is that of the gentleman colonizer and the patrician Orientalist. He is the kind of Tory who considers his more populist contemporaries to be impossibly gauche and unbecoming. For Mitchell, he embodies the figure of the Imperial wonder boy.

A former MP for the Cumbrian constituency of Penrith and the Borders, Stewart, the son of an imperial officer, was born in colonial Hong Kong. After the United StatesUK invasion of Iraq in 2003, he served as a deputy governor in a southern Iraqi district, having completed a thirty-six-day walk across Afghanistan the previous year an episode that Stewart frequently recalls and which forms the basis of his public image as a somewhat quixotic adventurer.

Mitchell highlights an anecdote from Stewarts memoirs in which he claims that a worried Afghan acquaintance mistook him for an Arab and attempted to warn him of the danger of the oncoming Anglo-American occupying forces. This was the ultimate accolade for Stewart, confirming his self-perception as a modern embodiment of the patrician imperialist tradition personified by the likes of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) a vital cog in the everyday functioning of the extractive empire, yet one who deflects criticism through a patronizing fetishization of indigenous cultures and languages.

During Stewarts bid for the Conservative leadership in 2019, he engaged in a series of filmed treks to promote his candidacy, bringing his imperial-wonder-boy persona to various locations across Britain itself, and often staying overnight in peoples homes. Sold as an effort to read the political pulse of the nation, it was a shallow performance indeed. Mitchell contrasts this carefully crafted public image with a revealing moment when Stewart referred to a house that had sheltered him, located in a traditionally working-class area of the northeast, as a crack den.

Mitchell mentions Ireland, one of Britains earliest colonies, several times throughout the book, drawing out the eugenicist underpinnings of anti-Irish bigotry and the primacy of exploited Irish labor in the construction of industry, domesticity, and empire. It is somewhat surprising, then, that he makes no mention of the long-running conflict in the North of Ireland.

The aftermath of that conflict has shown us that the core repressive institutions of British imperialism remain deeply resistant to acknowledging their historical wrongdoing, especially when it comes to the actions of the British military and the record of security-force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. In 2021 alone, we have seen another refusal to hold a public inquiry into the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane and the breakdown of trials of British soldiers charged with historic crimes, including the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972. The role that imperial nostalgia plays in contemporary Anglo-Irish relations could have made for a fascinating case study.

The fact that the Conservative government now feels emboldened to impose a statute of limitations on atrocities committed during the Troubles is linked to the growing militarization of British public life. Military involvement in sporting ceremonies, ahistorical attempts to rebrand World War I as a noble and necessary sacrifice, and the annual public meltdown around the subject of poppy-wearing in the buildup to Remembrance Sunday all serve to reinforce a culture of regressive nationalism.

Mitchell does touch on this phenomenon in the books introduction, picking up on the increasingly breathless and bizarre treatment of Captain Tom Moore, the war-veteran pensioner who undertook laps of his back garden to raise money for the National Health Service (NHS) in the early stages of the pandemic. The health service itself became the object of a kind of recuperative imperial nostalgia, with its centenarian fundraiser used to promote all kinds of mawkish nationalist sentiment.

In the books closing chapters, Mitchell builds on the work of Joe Kennedy and his concept of authentocracy to analyze the language of class and its relation to empire. There is a fascinating overview of historical projects that sought to categorize and map the working class of Britain, generally possessing the same air of detached fascination and barely disguised repulsion as comparable surveys of British colonial outposts at the height of empire.

Mitchell includes a priceless reference to a London evangelical philanthropist, Thomas Barnardo. Barnardos efforts to warn the great unwashed of the perils of drink and idleness met with derision from a gang of youths, who pelted him with human feces the kind of fate one might wish on Barnardos latter-day equivalents.

How can we escape from the seemingly endless feedback loops fueled by strident apologists for our imperial past? While much of Imperial Nostalgia makes for bleak reading, Mitchell does allow himself a qualified crumb of optimism in the books conclusion, which sees the pandemic as a potential blow against received notions of British exceptionalism and postwar anti-collectivism. As imperial nostalgia collides with the reality of an NHS that has not yet been fully subsumed into right-wing conceptions of nationalism, and which is sustained by the labor and sacrifice of ethnic-minority and immigrant workers, one such avenue for shifting the conversation about identity may emerge.

Throughout the book, Mitchell writes with eloquence, unsparing contempt for reactionary charlatanism, and a commitment to historical rigor that the objects of his most incisive criticism could learn from (but wont). All of which make this book one of the more perceptive and vital interventions that have emerged from an otherwise reductive and inadequate discourse surrounding Britains imperial past.

Read more:
Britain's Imperial Heyday Is Nothing to Be Nostalgic For - Jacobin magazine