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'Centrism, leaving things much as they are, is no longer practically possible,' says Natalie Bennett

That we have a Far Right government has become clearer than ever this week, demonstrated by events from the release of the Integrated Review of Security to the rush towards the Policing Bill.

What makes that fact harder to identify than usual is that this is not, some individual racists and authoritarians apart, an ideological Far Right government.

It is a Far Right government because it has identified that swooping in that direction, not just pushing the boundaries of what has been considered acceptable mainstream political discourse but smashing through them, is the best way to hold up its vote in the current political landscape.

The driving force is a Trumpian core vote strategy. That doesnt rely on being coherent, on making sense or on bothering about the traditional mainstream of its party, which the leadership assumes will stick with it no matter what (as proved all too true with the US Republican Party).

The strategy only needs to get a relatively small numbers of voters (and crucially social media users) revved up, energised and active. Theyll then do the campaigning work for the government spreading its message. Even many of those made uncomfortable by it will notice and vote while many will turn away from politics entirely in disgust.

This is a strategy that relies on setting up straw men like some kind of threat from a tiny number ofdesperate refugeesrisking their lives to cross the Channel then setting them on fire.

It means announcing a rushed plan for a Policing Bill todemolish basic rights, then letting it drift, content in the knowledge that with the local, regional and national elections (Wales and Scotland) only weeks away, your voters will have seen the signal loud and clear.

In previous times either of those events would have dominated the news for weeks, been analysed, dissected, explained.

But in the Culture Wars, the aim is to just keep flinging weapons. Even nuclear weapons.

The announcement of an increase in the cap in the UKs number of nuclear warheads was met with anger and bemusement from the military establishment from aformer First Sea Lordto aformer SAS chief.

But military figures are on a battleground that their training and experience has not prepared them for, the Culture War. The new nuclear warheads are really not aimed at the Russian or the Chinese, or some shadowy band of cyber warriors, but at explosively heating up our own islands at vaguely reminding voters of Corbynite politics that was so unpopular in Red Wall territory and spreading general fear and loathing.

So what do those opposed to the Far Right do?

Of course we have to call out the behaviour, combat the weapons, allow our anger to be evident. Otherwise the Far Right will become seen as the normal, the standard, the way things have always been. The danger must be named, the reality must be identified.

But theres a great danger in doing that necessary work, one that the military knows well, in fighting your opponent on the ground of their choosing, where theyre always on attack and youre grimly defending.

What also needs to be done is fight back with a different weapon, to open up a different front by setting out a vision of a positive, hopeful, inclusive future, one where we are not an isolated group holed up in Fortress UK, grimly fighting of intruders, clinging to ill-gotten gains, defending historic hierarchies.

Campaigns for a Universal Basic Income, for a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay, for restoring and rewilding our countryside, for a just transition to a climate-safe society are doing this work.

Where its frighteningly rare is in the mainstream of our politics on the nightly news, in the parliamentary chambers, even on the social media channels.

We have to get the balance of our politics right, between offence and defence. But above all we have to be clear about what is happening.

Centrism, leaving things much as they are, is no longer practically possible, given our climate emergency and nature crisis, the levels of poverty, inequality and insecurity that the current economic structures deliver. That entirely evident to the public.

They want a clear message of change, and strong emotions to match up to the evident urgency.

Hope is the opposite of fear, plenty the opposite of scarcity, care the opposite of hate.

We have to spread the understanding that there are more than sufficient resources for everyone on this planet to have a decent life while we protect the climate and restore the natural world means a hopeful, plenteous, caring world.

We need a stronghold, a castle of hope, a place of care where people will naturally flock, within strong walls built from respect for the rights and dignity of all. Thats a crucial step in pushing the Far Right threat back out into the fringe badlands.

As youre here, we have something to ask you. What we do here to deliver real news is more important than ever. But theres a problem: we need readers like you to chip in to help us survive. We deliver progressive, independent media, that challenges the rights hateful rhetoric. Together we can find the stories that get lost.

Were not bankrolled by billionaire donors, but rely on readers chipping in whatever they can afford to protect our independence. What we do isnt free, and we run on a shoestring. Can you help by chipping in as little as 1 a week to help us survive? Whatever you can donate, were so grateful - and we will ensure your money goes as far as possible to deliver hard-hitting news.

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Using nuclear weapons to fight the Culture War: that's Far Right government - Left Foot Forward

Liberals exhibit a rather poor understanding of the people who want to destroy them. For example, in a March 30 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette column titled, Asa and the Culture Wars, John Brummett lamented the state legislature wasting its time on matters addressing no legitimate public-policy need, but merely allowing pseudo-religious Christian nationalists to make themselves feel powerful by abusing their offices to pick on people they dont like or approve of or with whom they disagree. Such framing imagines that religions exist separately from people, that there is some idealized faith that can be betrayed by petty political posturing, whereas belief has always been manifest in peoples behavior, even in those acts that appear tremendously hypocritical. This sort of framing, too, runs the risk of painting legislative excesses as something novel, ignoring the much larger and longer history of cultural war conservatism in America.

Part of that tradition comes under the microscope in The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State, the excellent new book by University of Central Arkansas historian Kenneth C. Barnes. The title is a deliberate shot across the bow, for popular culture has trained us to think of the Klan as first and foremost a racist group, rather than a religious one. But centering racism does not help to explain why the KKK was so popular in places like Paragould, Harrison, and Bentonville places that were almost exclusively white. What Barnes does, instead, is to show how the Klan operated at the nexus of religion, race, business, leisure, law and politics. The Protestant white nationalist spirit represented by the Klan permeated all parts of life in Arkansas and beyond.

The broader history of the rise and fall of the Klan in America has already been expertly covered by the likes of Nancy MacLean, Rory McVeigh and Linda Gordon, and Barnes touches only lightly upon the national scene, instead exploring more fully the Arkansas experience, starting with an outline of the career of state KKK leader James Comer. Comer was a businessman, lawyer and devoted member of Little Rocks First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He was also active in local Republican Party circles, which put him at political odds with the majority of Southern Klansmen, although the national Klan courted people across political lines, especially in the West where the Republican Party was much more influential. Under Comers leadership, Arkansas became, by November 1923, one of five states the New York Times designated as controlled by the Klan, and Comer himself became a national figure in Klan circles. Little Rock was even selected as the national headquarters of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan auxiliary group.

The Klan counted very few working-class people among its numbers, instead recruiting local office holders, businessmen, farmers and various professionals. As Barnes writes, It provided white Protestants of some standing with a social life, entertainment, and a race of civic activities. In many ways, the Klan was not so different from the myriad of other fraternal and community organizations of the time. Many preachers became prolific evangelists for the Klan, like Rev. Ben Bogard, a Missionary Baptist minister of Little Rock, and Rev. John H. Moore of First Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, who also authored the textbook A School History of Arkansas, adopted by the State Textbook Commission in 1925 (a book that asserted negroes have every reason to be thankful that their ancestors were brought to this country as slaves). Klan meetings mimicked religious services, complete with the singing of hymns, and klaverns (the local Klan groups) regularly conducted Sunday visits to Protestant churches, where they would praise ministers and offer gifts of money. The Klan also took a moral stance that aligned it with these churches, including the Prohibition eras fight against liquor. Barnes details how Klansmen worked to stack the juries of suspected moonshiners and even took part in raids against illicit stills, most notably in Garland County. And their moral convictions led to the prosecution of other offenses; as Barnes notes, the Monticello Klan No. 108 proposed a secret committee to ascertain the names of young people who ride around in automobiles late at night. Just as conservatives do today, the Klan pitched much of its moral crusaderism as necessary to protect pure and virtuous (read as: white) women from degradation.

Barnes devotes a whole chapter to the political involvement of the Klan, including the use of the technique of the preferential primary to determine which Klansmen they would unite behind in the [Democratic] primary election. Many big names in Arkansas politics were, at one time, members of the Klan, including Gov. Tom Terral, Lt. Gov. Lee Cazort, Congressman John N. Tillman, Gov. Homer Adkins, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Lee Seamster, and Congressman William Frank Norrell. However, the Klans dominance in state politics provoked its own backlash, with people like John Martineau pitching themselves as anti-Klan candidates. And just like the churches it emulated, the Klan ended up splitting into multiple factions, largely based on accusations many of them accurate ones that state leaders were using the organization to line their own pockets, before largely fading away in the coming decade.

Yes, the Klan was a racist organization, and yes, its members most certainly participated in some of the most noteworthy cases of group violence in 1920s Arkansas: the riots that swept through the southern oilfields, the brutal breaking of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad strike and the lynching of John Carter in Little Rock. But more than anything, the Klan was a mainstream American organization, and as Barnes notes, its concept of One Hundred Percent Americanism became the foundation for the modern conservative movement in American politics. The Klans brand of Christian nationalism was not mere pseudo-religious posturing, but provided a moral vision for the future, one to be enforced by violence if necessary, and we can see the continued power of that vision in everything from state laws to limit gender nonconformity to the attempted coup dtat of Jan. 6, 2021, when Christian nationalists, and their allies in government, tried to take over the country, just like the Klan took over the state nearly a century ago.

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The Klan and the Kulture Wars: A review of Kenneth C. Barnes' new book on white nationalism in 1920s Arkansas - Arkansas Times

As reaction continue to pour in following the new documentary "Framing Britney Spears," the singer says she's trying to be a "normal person." USA TODAY

Jessica Simpson can't watch it. Jennifer Love Hewitt said it "hurt my heart." Paris Hilton suggested it clarified her own mistreatment. Drew Barrymore said it was familiar when the world thought her crazy, she was stripped of autonomy, too.

"Framing Britney Spears,"a New York Times documentary that examines the pop star's court battle to regain control of her life, was released in February but many female celebrities are still publicly talking about it. "Framing Britney" not only exposed the media's mistreatment of Spears, but also the toxic culture for all high-profile womenin the late 90s and 2000s.

The documentary is part of the trend of content revisiting big stories from the past with women at the center ("I, Tonya," "Truth and Lies," "The Price of Gold," "The Clinton Affair"). Many of those women are now speaking about the misogyny they faced and the sexism they internalized. Hewitt said she was "hopeful" things were changing. Are they?

"In some ways, absolutely it's better. In other ways, it's perhaps worse," said journalist Allison Yarrow, author of "90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality.

Analysis: 'Framing Britney' exposes a problem bigger than Britney

Experts in media, gender and pop culture say there is acknowledgment that many women who dominated the spotlight a couple of decades ago were far more dimensional than the media wanted us to believe. There's recognition now that there are certain questions which are inappropriate to ask, including whether someone is a virgin a question Spears, Simpson and other teen stars repeatedly faced. It's no longer acceptable to remark on the size of a woman's breasts in an interview, at least not without the Internet erupting in outrage.

Jessica Simpson said she won't watch the Spears' documentary because she "lived it."(Photo: Getty Images)

But female celebrities are still on the front lines of the nation's culture wars, balancing their own aspirations with their audience's desires and society's expectations. They are trying to navigate success in a culture that still demands access to their bodies and in many cases their private lives. Grammy Award winning singer Billie Eilish is known for wearing loose-fitting clothes to avoid sexualization and scrutiny, and people's preoccupation with her style shows what an anomaly she is.

Experts say there is also far more demand for content now than decades ago, making celebrities more vulnerable. While a rise in social media means public figures no longer need to be mediated through traditional mainstream news outlets, newer platforms come with their own perils: audiences feel an even greater entitlement to access and women become easier targets for online abuse. Last week, Chrissy Teigen left Twitter, saying "This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively."

While we debate past culpability, experts say we cannot ignore how the public continues to treat high-profile women in the present.

More: Britney Spears doc reminds Jennifer Love Hewitt of 'gross' interview questions she faced

"In each case, the shameless shaming that was aimed at these women when their stories were breaking is being retroactively revisited, rethought, and reframed with new insights that came from #MeToo, anti-bullying campaigns, and a general I hope increase in enlightenment about gender in America," said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "Although some of the discussions that have been catalyzed by 'Framing Britney Spears' invite a sense of optimism, I'm not quite so sanguine about the countless other cases that don't get to be argued on Hulu."

Much of what makes people gasp at the Spears documentary are the media questions she fielded: Ed McMahon asking a 10-year old Spears after a stunning performance on Star Search, "do you have a boyfriend?"Diane Sawyer askingSpears to react to the First Lady of Maryland wanting to "shoot her" for being a bad influence on her daughters.

Hewitt said it took her years to understand that the questions she was expected to answer, especially about her body, were wrong.

"For some reason, in my brain, I was able to just go, 'OK, well, I guess they wouldnt be asking if it was inappropriate," she said in an interview with Vulture. "Now that Im older, I think, 'Gosh, I wish that I had known ... so I could have defended myself somehow or just not answered those questions.' I laughed it off a lot of the time, and I wish maybe I hadnt."

For years, the mistreatment of Spears and her peers was invisible. Experts say these questions were completely normal at the time. No one thought otherwise not the interviewers, not the audience and as Hewitt demonstrates, sometimes not even the women themselves.

"People look back and they want to sort of point fingers and blame, acting as though they would have known better at the time, which they wouldn't have, because it was the time. Those were the types of questions that were asked," said Kristin Lieb, author of "Gender, Branding, and The Modern Music Industry: The Social Construction of Female Popular Music Stars." "Are they horrifying? Absolutely. Did most of us recognize them as horrifying? Some did and some didn't. Now we're much better at knowing where those lines are."

When Spears rose to fame, the mainstream media was far more powerful in shaping public narratives. There were fewer options for celebritiesto create alternatives.

Now, most celebrities and public figures have millions of followers on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, platforms which allow them to tell their stories in unadulterated ways or, at the very least, better control their messages.

"Monica Lewinsky ...can speak directly to more people now than the magazines and newspapers who pilloried her in the '90s," Yarrow said. "There is something better about the ability of women in public to speak directly to their audiences and to their fans."

At the same time, a 2017 reportfrom the Pew Research Center found women are about twice as likely as men to say they have been targeted online as a result of their gender.

Lieb said there is now more intense pressure for female celebrities to overshare in order to compete and satisfy audiences. A pop star, for example, who doesn't share as much of their life may receive less coverage "for not wishing to overextend themselves in increasingly personal ways."

When a female celebrity chooses to share the most intimate parts of herself, she also risks punishment. When Teigensuffered pregnancy loss earlier this year, she posted a picture of herself in the hospital in the throes of grief. Some social media users accused her of exploiting her own pain.

Chrissy Teigen on the red carpet during the 89th Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre.(Photo: Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY NETWORK)

Experts say part of the public's entitlement extends to women's bodies. Hyper-sexualization was a feature of the '90s, and continues to persist.

Simpson, who was frequently body shamed at the height of her fame, said in an interview with People magazine she "spent so many years beating myself up for an unrealistic body standard that made me feel like a failure all of the time. ... I don't think people always realized that there was a human being, a beating heart and working eyes with actual feelings behind those headlines and that words can hurt and stay with you for a lifetime."

Experts say it's a useful cultural exercise to think critically about the ways in which the public let many female celebrities down. But these reflections are just the start.

Yarrow said much of the conversation has focused on the mistreatment of white women and needs to expand to include women of color. After the Spears documentary, attention was paid to Justin Timberlake's past behavior toward Spears, but Janet Jackson fans also saidhe owed her an apology after their infamous Super Bowl halftime show performance in 2004. He eventually apologized to them both.

"The Britney Spears documentary opens up a conversation for the way that women were treated in the '90s, for conversations about fixating on body image and little else. And it is exciting to hear these other folks who experienced the same treatment speaking about it publicly. But it's only really the beginning," Yarrow said.

Yarrow cautions women who feel complicit in these stars' mistreatment against blamingthemselves. It's much bigger, she said, than any one interviewer, comedian, fan or troll.

"Let's look at some of the structural misogyny and racism that allowed women to be covered in the news media in this way," she said, "that allows them to still be covered in the news media in this way, and that has produced this next stage of public identity in social media that allows women to continue to be harassed and abused."

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Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and why women of the '90s are still being triggered by Britney Spears - USA TODAY

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, former Governor of Wisconsin and current Young Americas Foundation President Scott Walker joins Western Correspondent Tristan Justice to discuss how college campuses are the new frontier for the culture war and how conservatives can harness the opportunities presented by young people to spark change.

One of the mistakes I think conservatives have historically made is that we think and talk with our head. The left thinks and talks with their heart. We should never concede the logic, but find ways to communicate from the heart. I think thats just powerful, Walker said.

College campuses, Walker noted, are often a breeding ground for leftist ideology and conservatives should be ready to provide pushback now.

This is just an opportunity we have to address in our society for sure, but to use it to wedge in much, much bigger issues that are about really changing who controls the economy, about changing who dominates the government, and those are things that change the direction of where America is headed going forward, Walker concluded. We can continue to be a great country, and to improve. We dont need to adopt Marxist or even socialist philosophies to do that.

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Scott Walker On The New Frontier Of The Culture Wars - The Federalist

When Presbyterian pastor Walter Kim became the first person of color to lead the National Association of Evangelicals, he said he wanted to get beyond the metaphor of "culture wars" and instead build bridges.

But Kim took over the role as the country reached new heights of political polarization last year.

The father of two is tapping into his familys history as he enters his second year as the organizations leader and addresses a path forward for evangelical Christians.

Kim didnt grow up as an evangelical. He established his faith in high school and says he found comfort within evangelicalism's deep commitment to scripture, to personal transformation of Jesus.

His father, a refugee, escaped communist China by crossing a river in a barrel, he says. Kims dad eventually took the family to the U.S. with the help of a Lutheran pastor. Then for years afterward, an Irish Catholic family took Kims household under their wing, he explains.

People of faith have been deeply a part of my own family history in terms of welcoming us to America, he says.

As a pastor of color, he says he wants to summon that level of care and hospitality to reach across differences that right now seem insurmountable in a time of tremendous polarization." That means starting conversations about identity and faith.

NAE leaders, including himself, understand that having conversations about faith and identity can be complicated by what evangelicalism is often associated with whiteness, a certain political identity and a sense of hypocrisy between what the moral witness and character is of evangelicalism versus its statement, he says.

One in three American evangelicals identifies as a person of color. But a lot of emphasis has been put on white evangelicals, in part because of political divisions that were laid bare during the Trump administration.

Kim says there is a much richer history and diversity to evangelicalism than what the current narrative implies. The Assemblies of God, he points out, is 50% white congregants and 50% congregants of color.

In the past, evangelicals have engaged in issues of racial justice and reconciliation, he says. In 1912, the second conference of the NAACP was hosted at Park Street Church, a flagship evangelical church in Boston Kim says, adding he was the pastor there for 15 years. The first chartered group of the NAACP rose from that conference, he notes.

Yet, Kim acknowledges the conversations about racial justice movements are incredibly painful. Within the NAE, theres a moment of reckoning in terms of not just diversifying the people in the pews on Sundays, but how to support a diversity of culture where we engage meaningfully and in solidarity with the vastly different life experiences and expressions of faith, he says.

Thats no easy task. If it were, it would have been solved already, he says. Kim believes faith is well equipped to address these issues, even if religion hasnt always adequately addressed problems of identity and faith in the past.

Some evangelicals feel like many leaders in the movement sacrificed their credibility and moral high ground by adamantly aligning themselves with former President Donald Trump, as The Daily Beasts Matt Lewis reports.

While Kim makes it clear the NAE doesnt give political endorsements or statements, he says the organization does engage in policy that pertains to faith. Evangelicals have a wide range of political expressions, he says.

After Trumps loss, he says the wider community has been soul searching again on what is the appropriate use of power, and how would a follower of Jesus engage in this pluralistic society and constructive dialog even as it seeks to challenge and present a faith perspective?

For him, that means strengthening the political, social and cultural expressions and implications of evangelicalism in the public eye.

Right now, Kim is thinking deeply about public theology and raising the next generation of believers, he says, so evangelicals become more informed by scripture than we are informed by our social media feed.

James Perkins Mastromarinoand Ciku Theuri produced and edited this interview for broadcast withTodd Mundt. Serena McMahonadapted it for the web.

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National Association Of Evangelicals Leader Strives To Break Down Barriers, 'Build Bridges' - Here And Now