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President Trump ended his three-month hiatus from the campaign trail by plunging straight into the culture wars.

Why it matters: Trump is trying to tie former Vice President Joe Biden to demonstrators taking down statues across the country.

Between the lines: On stage, Trump called COVID-19 the "Kung-flu."

The big picture: Masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were scarce and couldnt be seen on the supporters behind him.

At one point in the speech Trump said he'd asked officials to "slow the testing down," complaining that high testing rates were to blame for America's high number of confirmed cases.

Reporters traveling with the president said that BOK Center, with a capacity of 19,000, was far from sold out. And the campaign cancelled a planned outdoor rally.

The big picture: Trump's revamped stump speech, given one day after Juneteenth, was directed at his base. He is showing no signs and no inclination of trying to unify the country.

Trump had an extended defense of his stage performance at West Point, insisting that he was wearing slippery leather soles, not the sticky rubber ones that were sported by his military escort.

The bottom line: Trump seemed to spend as much time focusing on Democratic mayors and governors as he did on Biden.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with the Biden campaign's comments.

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Trump returns to the campaign circuit: "So far tonight Im average" - Axios

In the anthology Sites of Memory, the architectural historian Kenrick Ian Grandison recounts the story of Robert Moton, President of Tuskegee Institute. In 1923, Moton secured federal funding to build a hospital for black World War I veterans. When local white leaders heard that the hospital would be managed and staffed by black management and health care workers, a mob gathered at Motons home with an agreement to sign. If he did not agree to white management, they would blow up the campus within 24 hours.

We have the legislature, we make the laws, we have the judges, the sheriffs, the jails. We have the hardware stores and the arms, he was told by one among the mob.

Grandisons essay, Negotiated Spaces, captures the racial conflict between black colleges and the segregated towns around them. The unevenness of the stakes is vivid. On one side, a mob who touted control of the government and the legal system, and weapons to kill Moton and destroy the college. On the other side, a community that wanted to build a hospital and care for black veterans.

The Moton attackers made clear that their way of life couldnt tolerate black growth because their culture relied on black compliance. A failure to comply would then require domination and possibly violence. Again, they were mad about a hospital.

The veterans hospital was built, despite the violent mobs that were normalised in America. The threat that stopped at Motons doorstep in Tuskegee did not stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921 a white mob burned down 40 city blocks in Greenwood, an African-American neighbourhood famous for social and economic mobility (see the image above). Men dropped kerosene bombs from airplanes and used firearms on the ground. By the end of the massacre on June 1, many of the 300 victims were buried in unmarked mass graves before being properly identified. The injured had no hospital, because it was burned as well.

After Trump officials announced their plans for a June 20th campaign rally in Tulsa, the violence of the massacre has been widely discussed. Beyond that, the echoes of Tulsa can be heard in President Trumps racist rhetoric. For another President, the Tulsa trip could be coincidental, but the cultural agency of President Trump relies on violent protection of the status quo.

After white supremacists staged a violent and deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Virginia, Mr. Trumps referred to attendees as good people. His language choice welcomed comparisons to the countrys history of racial violence. The mobs in Charlottesville, Tuskegee, Tulsa, are consistent with the viewpoint Mr. Trump has championed in the so-called culture wars.

As the threat to Moton showed, government forces and mob justice were both means of forced compliance and domination. Sometimes they worked in tandem, and sometimes they were separate paths to the same violent ends. We have the judges, the sheriffs, the jails

The Presidents most overt calls for domination have come through calls for aggressive policing. In a July 2017 speech to Long Island police officers, he urged them not to be too nice, when arresting suspects. He not only condoned violence during arrests, he encouraged it. The current Department of Justice has abandoned most oversight of police departments, and this, coupled with the Presidents encouragement, has worsened historical tensions. The sense of a culture war between police and the citizens has either ignored or minimised the harm inflicted on the people whom law enforcement officers are meant to protect.

Motons aggressors stopped at his doorstep. Breonna Taylors did not. Three Louisville, Kentucky police officers, Brett Hankison, Johnathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove entered her home in plain clothes, without identifying themselves, looking for a man already in custody. They shot her eight times, killing her in her bed. The war on cops has become a dangerous myth, and the warlike posturing has given cover to Breonna Taylors killer. Last week when the Louisville Police Department released the incident report, the nearly empty page listed no forced entry and no injuries. In their reckoning, she has been killed and then erased.

When I read Grandisons recount, the name Robert Moton was familiar. I have visited the Tuskegee Army Air Field named in his honor and seen the artifacts that mark the history of the place. Once the Tuskegee Airmen completed their flight training, they fought fascists and helped to liberated Europe. In stories about the Airmen, its common to hear about the war they fought abroad and the one they faced in America when they returned in 1945, three years away from a desegregated U.S. military, nine years away from the Brown decision, and twenty years away from the Voting Right Act of 1965. Call this a culture war, certainly, but only one side can rightfully be called just.

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America's long culture war - TheArticle

Prime ministers and chancellors can sometimes boast an influence over their country so strong that it lasts long after they leave office. Such was the dominance of William Gladstones economic policies, it used to be said that the Grand Old Man occupied the Treasury from 1860 to 1930. More recently, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown enjoyed 10 and 13 years in office respectively. Yet their influence lives on in government.

Increasingly, many conservatives are scratching their heads and wondering why, in the words of Prof Matthew Goodwin, the Tories are winning elections but losing the culture war. Of course, some dispute that language: after all, unlike America, we do not suffer interminable political battles over issues like abortion rights and gun ownership. Mercifully, we have so far been spared the misery of Trump-style political debate, into which the US appears to be sinking ever deeper.

But who can doubt we are engaged in a culture war of our own? The Brexit referendum not only revealed a cultural chasm in Britain, it also helped to widen it further. It demonstrated that many millions of citizens thought very differently about their identity compared with the governing classes, and it polarised the country even further, as many MPs spent the next three years doing everything they could to thwart the result.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that Britains culture war is limited to departing the European Union. As academics and opinion researchers attest, Britains political divides are no longer defined only by economic issues, such as taxation and spending on public services. They are defined at least as much by attitudes to cultural issues, such as sovereignty, immigration and human rights.

And on these issues, many conservatives feel like they are losing. Immigration has been sky-high for approaching a quarter of a century and showed no signs of stopping pre-Covid-19. Criminals and illegal immigrants often evade the law by citing their human rights. Extremists can spout their hatred and recruit and radicalise their followers without intervention. And this is a serious problem: who will have been surprised that the suspect in Saturdays stabbings in Reading turned out to have been known by the intelligence agencies?

For public information campaigns about cervical screening, the NHS has refused to address women, instead preferring people with a cervix, for fear of offending transgender campaigners. The police, who rarely miss an opportunity to act tough with soft targets, stand and watch violent protesters desecrate war memorials and vandalise national monuments. The Archbishop of Canterbury reflecting a tendency to assert that white people are unavoidably racist simply because of their own skin colour has prayed for white Christians [to] repent of our own prejudices.

These examples show why conservatives feel they are losing the culture war. It is possible to believe in tackling racial injustice without having to accept that white people are by definition the problem. It is possible to respect those with gender dysphoria, without believing that a womans right to privacy and safety should be sacrificed. It is possible to believe that everybody has the right to protest and demonstrate, while also believing that the police should uphold the law.

So why, when Tories have been in government for more than a decade, does it seem that cultural liberals and Left-wingers are in the ascendancy?

In part, it is because a culture war is precisely what its name suggests: it is about culture as much as what governments do with the levers of power. There is little ministers can do when celebrities, or businesses, use their platform to make arguments that conservatives reject.

It is partly because we no longer have unitary government in Britain: ministers in Whitehall might be Conservatives, but there is, for example, a Labour mayor in London, and if he wants to weigh in on debates about old statues, he can do so.

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Conservatives can't win the culture wars while Blair and Brown's legacy remains intact - Telegraph.co.uk

By Melanie Phillips

In Britain, statues of historical figures associated with colonialism or slavery are being pulled down or slated for removal. This is to appease the Black Lives Matters activists and their supporters, both black and white, who have seized upon the appalling death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody to claim that Western society is fundamentally racist.

The destruction of these statues and similar artifacts, which are part of the cultural memory of a civilization, inescapably calls to mind another act of cultural extermination the Nazi regimes burning of books in the 1930s. They threw into the fire books by Jewish, socialist, liberal or any other authors they deemed to be inimical to Nazi ideology. They did this to erase a Western culture they wanted to destroy and replace by their own horrific ideas.

The removal of Britains statues is not just a protest against racism. Its an attempt to destroy an entire culture and replace it by a society organized according to an unchallengeable dogma.

Of course, theres anti-black, racial prejudice in America and Britain. Theres also vicious black anti-Semitism, just as there are black people who are deeply sympathetic to the Jewish people and Jews who are prejudiced against black people.

The point is that racial prejudice exists in every single society, in the developing world as well as in the west. To single out the West as endemically racist is therefore a gross double standard and calumny.

As usual, however, liberal Jews have taken the wrong side in this most explosive development of the culture wars against the West. Having fully internalized the inversion of truth and lies, victim and oppressor involved in identity politics, they have uncritically embraced black victimology, which casts black people as the invariable victims of white society, and championed the agenda and values of Black Lives Matter.

Endorsing that groups representation of its own anti-white, racist, anti-Semitic animus as anti-racism, they have also engaged in the vicious demonization of anyone who dares call out BLM activists for what they really are.

After the Zionist Organization of America president Mort Klein denounced BLM on Twitter as a a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, denounced him as a racist and tried to get the ZOA kicked out of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.

In Britain, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has set up a commission to investigate racial prejudice within the Jewish community. It isnt clear whether this is to be confined to alleged racism by the community towards its tiny number of black Jews or whether it will cover alleged community racism towards non-Jews.

There may be instances of community prejudice against some black Jews or Jews married to black people. Those who have experienced the isolation and rejection resulting from this deserve sympathy, and it is a worthy aim to seek to address it. However, the context in which this inquiry has been launched is not auspicious.

In both Britain and America, anyone who criticizes black victimology for its anti-white, anti-Jewish, insurrectionist or subjectively suspect side is called a racist. A Twitter mob then assembles to strip such people of their reputation, platform or job for the crime of telling the truth.

In an atmosphere redolent of the 17th-century Salem witch trials, the risk is that the Board of Deputies may have appointed a hanging jury to find Britains Jewish community guilty under rigged cultural rules. If so, this would be yet another example of the board taking a knee to people with a rotten agenda, but who have the power to dictate the terms of public debate.

Its not just that many liberal Jews are on the wrong side of this titanic struggle to defend civilization.

Its not even that they dont recognize the danger to themselves from an agenda of destroying a culture whose roots lie in the Hebrew Bible. Its also a striking fact that the tactics now being used in this ramped-up onslaught against the west are mirrored in the attempt to bring down the State of Israel.

Pulling down the statues is the physical manifestation of the decades-long attempt, through the hijack of the education system, to destroy the West by erasing the record of its achievements and presenting it instead as intrinsically racist, colonialist and evil.

In Israel, Palestinians have systematically vandalized archeological digs in Jerusalem in order to tip into the garbage excavated materials containing possibly priceless artifacts. They do this to destroy the evidence that is constantly being dug up of the ancient kingdom of Israel and thus the unique claim of the Jews to the land. By attacking these ancient items, they are physically trying to erase the Jews own history.

Black victimology routinely blames others for all disadvantage suffered by black people, denying the part the played by chance, misfortune or their own behavior, while claiming moral impunity as victims for any wrongs they may themselves do.

Palestinians blame Israel for all their misfortune, falsely accusing it of driving them out of their homeland and denying them their own state.

At the same time, they deny their century-old war to destroy the Jewish homeland and have always refused the offer of a Palestine state that has been repeatedly made to them ever since the 1930s.

BLM activists smear Western society with distorted claims about slavery and oppression in order to both facilitate and obscure their real agenda of overturning white capitalist society.

Palestinians smear Israel with false claims about occupation and oppression in order to both facilitate and obscure their real agenda of wiping Israel off the map.

Anti-white racists project their own offense of racism onto others, falsely accusing anyone who criticizes the sinister agenda of black victimology of being a racist.

Palestinians, whose aim is a Palestine state from which all Jewish residents of the land would be driven out, project their own agenda of racist ethnic cleansing onto Israel, which they accuse with malicious and demonstrable absurdity of committing genocide against the Palestinians.

BLM supporters who single out the West as the endemically racist perpetrators of slavery while ignoring the same or worse in the rest of the world subject the West to a double standard.

Palestinians and their supporters who single out Israel as a human-rights abuser while ignoring Palestinian anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-free-speech and other human-rights abuses, as well as ignoring the human-rights abuses of the other tyrannies and terrorist regimes of the world, are practicing a double standard straight out of the anti-Semitism playbook.

Palestinianism is the poster cause of Western progressives. It is no coincidence that the tactics being used in the culture war against the West turn out to be the same tactics used against Israel.

What starts with the Jews never stops with the Jews. In this current mayhem on the streets of America and Britain, so it is now playing out before our horrified eyes.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author.

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Echoes in the culture war against the West - The Jewish Star

Culture watch: Toppling History and Nuance

Many liberals really do think that America is fascist, laments Daniel McCarthy in Spectator USA, so they genuinely see petty vandalism as a heroic act of resistance. Knock the head off a statue of Columbus, smash the glass of every storefront on the street, and youre defeating Adolf Hitler all over again. The sheer ignorant zealotry means all nuance is lost to the iconoclasts. Thus, they attacked an Appomattox statue in a DC suburb, named for the courthouse at which the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered. Far from a gesture of defiance toward the victorious North, it showed an unarmed soldier, eyes downcast and arms crossed, his face somber an image of manly defeat intended to trouble a civilization given to self-congratulation and as a reminder that even Americans know what it is like to lose a war.

Liberal: Experts Catastrophic COVID Messaging

For months, scientists and other experts have known that warm weather, mask-wearing and better hygienic practices could mitigate the spread of COVID-19 yet, New Yorks David Wallace-Wells sighs, they failed to communicate most of these nuances to the American public, insisting that lockdowns were absolutely necessary. Adding to the confusion, many of the experts alternately played down the threat before they vociferously attacked Wisconsins in-person election then 180d to defend left-wing protests. The United States is now the single most significant global incubator of the pandemic thanks to these messaging failures.

Science desk: To the Moon, SpaceX!

SpaceXs successful rocket launch last month proves that commercially developed spacecraft can carry crews to the moon and perhaps beyond much faster and cheaper than wed ever envisioned, Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam cheer at The Washington Post. Shouldnt we take advantage of it? When Vice President Mike Pence challenged NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2024, it just kept working on its Orion spacecraft still years away from launch. Yet SpaceXs Dragon craft, used in last months launch, is cheaper and much better than Orion and doesnt require building a new space station, as NASA proposes. If Team Trump and Congress really want to reach the moon by 2024, they should embrace private firms efforts.

Conservative: Our Broken Republic

Historically, The New York Times Ross Douthat points out, Americas culture wars were often settled through democratic deliberation, rather than the kind of ruling the Supreme Court just delivered on gay and transgender civil rights. In an earlier age, Congress debated and passed laws. State legislatures did the same. Constitutional amendments were proposed, passed, ratified and when necessary, repealed. But now, Congress hardly legislates, and the Supreme Court does the heavy lifting on social and cultural issues. That leaves major decisions to a select few robed and highly educated lawyers and their preferences. The boundaries of voting rights and free expression are policed by John Roberts. Our abortion laws reflect the preferences of Anthony Kennedy. And now anti-discrimination law and religious liberty protections will reflect what Neil Gorsuch, author of the new decision, thinks is right and good. Whether such a republic can last, Douthat archly concludes, rests with a higher court.

Education beat: A Vet for (College) President

University of South Carolina President (and US Army vet) Robert L. Caslen faced dissention from board members, student organizations and faculty members early on but, Barrett Y. Bogue and Emma Moore note at The Hill, he now enjoys high praises on how he approached his first few months on the job. Indeed, research shows that veterans bring unique and beneficial skills to higher-education leadership roles. The military and academia, after all, share overlapping values, traditions and leadership opportunities, including mission focus, resiliency and comfort with ambiguity. These skills will be invaluable to university systems now facing a number of challenges, including decreasing enrollment, that require flexible leaders prepared to navigate the unknown. Bottom line: More schools should look beyond academia and hire veterans.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Toppling history and nuance and other commentary - New York Post