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JULY 30, 2017

IN Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zero Books, 2017), Angela Nagle does two remarkable things. First, she situates the emergence of alt-right meme culture in a dialectical relationship to Professional Managerial Class liberalism thats incarnated, she argues, by Barack Obama: articulate, erudite, cosmopolitan. This timely intervention allows us to understand how the United States of America elected a troll president who delighted throughout his campaign in inflaming a sense of grievance while giving the finger to the first enemy of the culture war: political correctness. Second, she provides the thick anthropological context for the emergence of the alt-right and its media friendlier faces, what she calls the alt-light. Nagles book is a highly readable polemical intellectual history of culturalism and the internet; it makes the case that there would be no Trump without the prankster sadism of meme culture. Its a credit to the books critical sophistication that both ends of the identity politics spectrum will feel aggrieved by Nagles assessment of their tactics and their politics.

Kill All Normies opens by giving readers an overview of the utopian promises of networked horizontality: it shows us that, contra to the hopes of many on the left, hackerist anonymity married to group psychology and fast internet connections did not produce better politics. Nagles book tracks, for instance, the complex online polarization that sprang up after the Cincinnati Zoo shot Harambe, the gorilla into whose cage a young African-American child had fallen: online, internet-driven mourning rituals around Harambe intersected complexly with viral memes making fun of those same rituals. From there, Nagles book moves to build on her thesis that the cultural politics of transgression, so long fetishized by the left, have been triumphantly adopted by the right. She then offers an account of the viciousness of Tumblr liberal authoritarianism, with its ever-proliferating new forms of gender identities and the finger-pointing sanctimony of identity vanguardism. Nagle likens the extreme political correctness of Tumblr culture wars to virtue hoarding: only the select are virtuous and know how to handle the new identities correctly. The rest of us are sausage-fingered cis-gendered idiots who need to do the perp walk of shame every day. Competitive Tumblr shaming shuts down not only dialogue but also the very possibility for solidarity and coalition building along the shared experiences of alienation and exploitation.

Nagles final chapters deal with the anti-feminist Manosphere that gave us rape apologists, male separatism, and the Proud Boys, a pseudo-fascist group who now show up to campuses to defend free speech and far-right speakers while provoking violent confrontations around campus culture wars. These chapters show how the new internet culture of male sexual grievance gave permission to express openly and directly violence against and hatred of women, with the most tragic result being Elliot Rodgers mass murders. Finally, Nagle unexpectedly draws a stunning connection between online misogyny and the treatment of inexperienced participants or, as they are called in the internet-born language leetspeak, n00bs. In her conclusion, she brings it all back to an analysis of the alt-light presidency of Donald Trump, concluding with a clear denunciation of transgression as a political form. The book is breathtaking and concise. It is a slim volume and a must-read, although its worth saying that the intermittent misspelling of Pat Buchanans name was irritating and distracting. Zero Books: If you are going to be publishing a volume of such political and intellectual significance, make sure you get copyediting in perfect order.

Nagle does not invite us to share a thrilling sense of horror and disgust at the cruelty of alt-right and alt-light meme culture; instead, she implicates left strategies in particular and contemporary internet culture in general in participating in the creation of a world in which the alt-right could rise. In some ways, Nagles book explains Hillary Clintons dramatic failure to damage Donald Trumps campaign when she fingered him as a champion of the alt-right. Clintons great reveal was greeted by alt-right champion Richard Spencer as great publicity, and Trump voters did not move to the middle. To Nagle, Clintons shaming strategies reveal her ignorance of the actual political dynamics of the electorate.

Nagle argues convincingly that the most prolific actors on the alt-right and the alt-light have been great students of the culture wars, but not in the way we might think. Alt-right movements did not model themselves after aspirational aristocrats and defenders of Western tradition like William F. Buckley Jr. or Allan Bloom. No! Instead, they have adopted the fetishism of transgression that marked the Cultural Studies left: they embedded themselves in subcultural styles repellent to mainstream, middlebrow liberal sensibilities and they call on their armies to attack the tastes and sensibilities embodied by n00bs and normies. Punk street style of the mid- to late 1970s, with its Vaselined Mohawks and safety-pinned T-shirts appeared as rebellious and, to Dick Hebdige, deeply meaningful attacks on working-class masculinity. Ironic meme culture attacks continues to pater la bourgeoisie by targeting nave online expressions of sentimentality in spontaneous actions, ranging from the defacement of Facebook memorial pages and to hijacking Cincinnati Zoo Director Thane Maynards Twitter account to spread #DicksoutforHarambe.

Nagle is one of the brightest lights in a new generation of left writers and thinkers who have declared their independence from intellectual conformity with liberal academic nostra about difference and hegemony. Whereas Hebdige found punk and subcultural expressions of rebellion as politically progressive and anti-authoritarian, Nagle is willing to question the Cultural Studies assumption that the margins represent a kind of political wisdom that the uninitiated need Roland Barthes to decode.

At the center of this book and in what is one of its most brilliant and controversial chapters, Gramscians of the alt-light, Nagle argues the alt-light succeeded in creating its own form of transgression-based revolt against the cultural hegemony of establishment sensibilities. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist activist and thinker, spent 11 years in prison under Italian fascists. His greatest legacy was his critique of Marxist economic determinism, a position that was embraced by left academics in the Anglo-American world. During the 1970s and 80s, in light of the decline of Old Labour and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, Anglo-American leftists used Gramscis ideas of cultural hegemony to describe plans for the political importance of establishing alternative culture and alternative media: its everyday practices of cultural production and consumption would extract political gold by mining the marginal and the debased, camp and trash styles of expression that high to middlebrow taste cultures rejected.

Provocatively, Nagle argues that it was the alt-right that applied the strategies of changing popular taste through alternative media most successfully. Steve Bannons political ambitions were realized at Breitbart, where his intellectual animus against mainstream/lamestream media found angry audiences hungry for an alternative political discourse promoted by more and more extreme voices.

Furthermore, alt-light figures like Milo Yiannopoulos (before his downfall) and mustachioed Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes have succeeded in shaping popular culture and its audiences media consumption habits through alternative and subcultural channels. McInnes was forced to leave Rooster, the hipster ad agency that he founded, after he published an article entitled Transphobia is Perfectly Natural on Thought Catalog in 2014; it is widely seen as a piece of hate speech. He was also forced out of Vice for his extreme views. Yet these removals have not diminished McInness media influence: through his YouTube channel, Rebel Media, and other venues such as Fox News, McInnes remains an emblem of right-wing cool. These and similar figures said outrageous things and took outrageous positions, adorning themselves in the Nietzschean finery of punk dandies ready to rock your centrist world: Although the tactics of the online right are updated to a digital age, it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, Nagle writes, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture. Rather than operating exclusively through formal politics, they succeeded largely by bypassing the dying mainstream media and creating an Internet-culture and alternative media of their own from the ground up. The left has created its own alternative media: the addictive and brilliant podcast Chapo Trap House and Jacobin are two recent success stories, but Nagle points out that the alt-light and the alt-right have been more popular and more successful at brewing loyal right-wing audiences.

Nagle goes on to argue that the online social movements of the right, with a constellation of interlocking and multilayered alternative media platforms, spanning YouTube, Twitter, and news sites like Breitbart, created a pantheon of alt-light media celebrities ready to deliver a punch in the gut to their self-defined enemies: liberals and snowflakes. They built audiences by giving the finger to the superego of professionally managed social tolerance, and of course, that long-hated bogeyman, political correctness. The mainstream media and the Democratic Party underestimated the power of these alternative media outlets and the outsized personalities that they promoted. They thought that when Hillary Clinton named this movement in her campaign against Donald Trump, underinformed Trump sympathizers would recoil at any association with the proto-fascist agenda of these groups.

Trumps boasts about pussy grabbing fit right into the alt-light subcultural style: hedonistic, misogynistically irreverent, imbued with a vulgar lust for life, Trump could always allude to the light-heartedness of Pepe meme-making, while trashing the snowflake/virtue-signaling sensibilities of the liberal internet at the same time.

Erstwhile poster boy for the alt-light Milo Yiannopoulos made his name during the Gamergate controversies (the 4chan-spawned war between male gamers and female game critics like Anita Sarkeesian that led to the by-now-familiar doxxing and death threats against any proponent of greater diversity and gender representation in formerly male-nerd-dominated online environments). He went on to become an editor at Breitbart and embarked this past winter on a violence- and controversy-plagued tour of US campuses, where he would display signs like Dear Trump: Please Deport Fat People before launching into diatribes against political correctness. Nagle points out that Yiannopoulos disingenuously drew a direct line between the online culture wars he waged in the 2010s with Buchanans invocation of the struggle for the soul of America in his speech to the Republican National Convention of 1992. But Milos hereditary relationship with Buchanans fire-and-brimstone evangelism is less salient than he wants to believe, and this tension helps explain the limits of what he accomplished. Yiannopouloss eventual downfall captures all the irony of a right-wing outrage dandy trying to cozy up to an Evangelical Christian forefather he called Daddy. Yiannopouloss defense of free speech through pressing the limits of the publicly thinkable and sayable is related to the dark side of radical internet libertarianism: Nagle points out that the right-wing style that Yiannopoulos embodied represents a marriage of the ironic, irreverent, taboo-busting culture of 4chan with the politics of the right.

In 2014, the Washington Post published a bemused but fundamentally positive account of 4chan here.4chan is an anonymous forum launched in 2003, home to cat memes and celebrity nude photo leaks, pornified sadism and Nietzschean voluntarism. The most extreme corners of 4chan are located at /b/ and /pol/, places where darker fantasies of beta-males and political irreverence are shared. It was the image- and humor-based culture of the irreverent meme factory of 4chan and later 8chan that gave the alt-right its youthful energy, with its transgression and hacker tactics, Nagle explains. And these energies manifested elsewhere, as well: The Guy Fawkes mask used in the protests in 2011 was a reference to Anonymous, which took its name, leaderless anticelebrity ethic and networked style from the chaotic anonymous style of 4chan. Rather than romanticize the power of Anonymous troll armies as forces that can threaten Evil Corporation la televisions Mr. Robot, Nagle shows that the power of 4chans mob actions were most effectively exercised against grieving parents on Facebook, n00bs who used the internet too navely, and feminist computer game critics.

4chan-driven persecution delights in the victimization of the uninitiated and the ingnue in much the way that 18th-century libertines from Choderlos de Laclos and the Marquis de Sade delighted in describing the ravishing of besotted know-nothing virgins. At stake in a sense of belonging to extreme right groups is a sense of powerful insider knowledge. Nagle dissects the relationship between the dark resentments against women and mainstream culture nursed on 4chan and the rhetoric of the Proud Boys, Roosh V, and Richard Spencer, who all advocate an anti-feminist, anti-mainstream-culture sensibility that is based on a mixture of punks subcultural hypermasculinity and alternative culture erudition married to pride in Western Cultural traditions identity politics for white men, appropriating the terms of Gay and Black Pride to defend white male identity.

In her description of 4chan and alt-right subcultures, Nagle is unstinting in her critiques of both moral panic responses and academic ultra-PC tolerance of chan cultures transgressive and countercultural ethos. Before 2016, Nagle notes that academics like Whitney Phillips, author of This is Why We Cant Have Nice Things: The Relationship Between Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press, 2016), offered a fundamentally troll-sympathetic account of the relationship between deviant behavior and the mainstream. For Phillips, trolls are basically harmless DIY meme producers responding to large-scale, mass-produced cultural meanings that dominate the media landscape. In this sense, Phillips and Gabriella Coleman, author of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2015) embrace /chan/ cultures contempt for n00bs and mainstream taste. Nagle points to the work of Sarah Thorntons study of subcultural capital (Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Wesleyan University Press, 1996) as a powerful counterpoint to affirmations of 4chan, Anonymous, and hacker elites.

Following Thornton, Nagle refuses to accept subcultural claims about its own righteous exclusivity: the accumulation of subcultural capital by punks, club kids, and now the alt-right look extraordinarily similar, especially when all these subcultures share a hatred of the shallow, vain clueless girl with mainstream tastes trying to infiltrate a geeky subculture. She argues that the hatred of the basic bitch has become an organizing principle for the subcultural formation itself. Taking as an example Richard Spencer, the 39-year-old president of the white-nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute, Nagle emphasizes Spencers reliance on cool: Richard Spencer regularly accuses those who fail to find the return of race separatism edgy and cool, of being normies and basic bitches. Finally, Nagle shows that Richard Spencers neo-fascist political style has not sprung directly from 1930s Germany, but is a response to Obamas cool liberal style, 4chan, new media history, alternative medias war against cultural hegemony as well as academic fetishism of anti-normativity, subculture, and transgression.

Nagles measured prose, her commitment to both context and dialectics, contradiction and convergence as well as her stark imperturbability in the face of deeply disturbing materials make her the ideal reader of both liberal and academic hypocrisy as well as alt-right instrumentalization of transgression as politics. The alt-rights promotion of racism and misogyny happens in an online space that is increasingly characterized by vicious antagonisms. The alt-right and alt-lights war on respectability has to be framed as an aggravation of contemporary class warfare.

Her critique of Tumblr liberalism, however, needs an added dimension: this particularly violent and intolerant form of identity politics represents the political and cultural vanguard of an increasingly toxic Professional Managerial Class, whose need to consolidate its economic advantages comes during a time of stringent class consolidation. In 1976, John and Barbara Ehrenreich noted that PMC monopoly on progressive/left politics was a development in class conflict that would have profound effects on the rise of neoliberalism and globalization in the decades to come. While this class emerged as an enemy or at least an antagonist of capital during the early decades of the 20th century, its political neutrality has become increasingly complicit with the status quo of income inequality. In order to differentiate itself culturally from the working classes and the interests of finance capital, it draws upon the sentimental and melodramatic innovations of its forebears of the 18th century. Suffering and victimization become its calling cards: a precious and esoteric language of difference and tolerance supplant an analysis of contradiction and solidarity. It focuses on hegemonic cultural politics and self-improvement and the transformation of everyday life.

Its political betrayal of working-class interests and its refusal to work toward economic distribution are disguised by its liberal/managerial and deeply technocratic and apolitical attitude toward progress. As long as the PMC has no sense of its alliance with the salaried masses, popular discontent and hatred of its precious ways will be fertile ground for the fomenting of internet-driven forms of Anglophone fascism. Angela Nagle has shown that in the absence of solidarity and a real political, economic program on the left, we will continue to see the popularity of alt-right sadism and mischief-based memes, gesturing toward a dystopic space of irony and hipness, policed by trolls with fascist tendencies. When pressed, spokespeople of the alt-right and alt-light will say that they only want the establishment of a white ethno-state. If you insist on the details of police-state measures, violent exclusion, and genocide necessary to achieve their goal, they retreat into hipster irony and protestations about the innocence of their separatist dreams. Professional Managerial Class liberalism has not only failed at destroying fascism and white supremacy, but it may also very well, through its cultivation of culturalist pieties and neglect of economic policies, add to the appeal of its most virulent adversaries.

Catherine Liu is professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. Author of two academic monographs, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton and American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique, she has also published a novel called Oriental Girls Desire Romance.

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Dialectic of Dark Enlightenments: The Alt-Right's Place in the ... - lareviewofbooks

Something Josh Barro Text ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/SolidText ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/Solid$ID/NothingText ColorText Color$ID/NothingText ColorText Colorrecently wrote in a Business Insider essay struck a raw nerve with me: Except on abortion, where public opinion remains about evenly divided, conservatives have implicitly admitted that they have lost certain parts of the cultural war.

Hes probably right. Most conservatives can see that our culture is changing at what appears to be breakneck speed.

As I observe the changes, the question for me as a conservative is no longer How do I/we stop this? Were well past that stage.

Once in a while in conversations with friends, I allude to the old slippery slope, which instantly makes me the target for their loving scorn. This isnt the slippery slope, Phil. Its progress. The conversation usually ends there, with me stubbornly clinging to my thoughts of humanity at the highest point of the roller coaster, poised to take the plunge straight down into the abyss.

The signs of change are becoming more and more pronounced. A case like Charlie Gard, where the State apparatus has supplanted parental rights, has become legally acceptable. At what point will society decide this arrangement is also morally acceptable? Will it become normative?

It wasnt too long ago that euthanasia was almost impossible to imagine. Now, its becoming increasingly tolerable, even to the point where involuntary euthanasia is being practiced (NCBI/NIH abstract The Illusion of Safeguards 6/2012). Polite discussions about what to do with unwanted or unhealthy children are now taking place, thanks to the work of ethicists like Princetons Peter Singer and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, both of whom advance the grisly idea that killing a child is a morally sound decision. Coyne recently put it this way in a blog posting dated July 13th: This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide is the result of the tide of increasing morality in the world.

Not to be outdone, Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State University, wrote about the painful death of his newborn son. After reflecting on his agonizing experience, he decided that the repugnant has become reasonable. The unthinkable has become the right, the good. Painlessly. Quickly. With the assistance of a trained physician You should have killed your baby.

How far into the abyss have we plunged? Just this morning I read a piece in the Palm Beach Post about some teenage boys in Florida who mocked and filmed Jamel Dunn, a 32-year-old disabled man, as he drowned. The more Dunn pleaded for help, the more they mocked. Get out the water, you gonna die one teen can be heard shouting. Another yelled to the man aint nobody fixing to help you, you dumb (expletive).

According to Florida law, the teens hadnt done anything wrong. There may be a statute they violated by not reporting a death, but mocking a dying man and making a video of his ordeal isnt illegal. Is it immoral? It probably is now, but will we get to the point where even things like this will become morally acceptable?

I just finished reading Rod Drehers The Benedict Option A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. The book is in part a tome and in part an indictment of the modern Christian church. Dreher bores in right away, arguing that the church, which should be a counterforce to secularism, has become content to be the chaplaincy to a consumerist culture that was fast losing a sense of what it meant to be Christian.

Dreher argues that Christians have some very important decisions to make. As a baseline, he cites the work of Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who saw that the time was coming when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue.

Dreher then argues, quite persuasively, that Christians need to pull away from the rest of society? He calls it the Benedict Option.

I think he may be right.

We conservative Christians need to understand we have lost the culture wars. The question for us is no longer how to stop the wheels of the machine, but rather it is now a question of how those who choose to can live a meaningful, Christian life in such an environment.

The signs of the times all point to one thing. The Christian pilgrimage for many right now is difficult. Our input is neither valued nor wanted. The path is narrow; the light seems dim. Yet, in spite of the difficulties, we need to press on, in our own way. As W.H. Auden put it in his short poem Atlantis, we must:

Stagger onward rejoicing

And even then if, perhaps

Having actually got

To the last col, you collapse

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The culture war - Emporia Gazette

Boy Scouts listen as President Donald Trump speaks during the National Boy Scout Jamboree in Glen Jean, West Virginia, on Monday.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

As is often true of Trumps speeches, his address on Monday in front of the Boy Scouts of America would have been reasonably appropriate if he had simply given the speech as written. The scripted version was not great but passable. Trumps asides, as always, sent the speech off the rails, full of references to his win, fake news, fake polls, Hillarys sins, another swipe at Obama, and so on.

Backlash in the world of the Scouts was instantaneous. Those of us raised in ScoutingI say as an Eagle Scout myself, and author of a book on Scoutingknow that a fundamental rule of the BSA is that it is nonpartisan. We were taught never to wear our uniforms at a political event or to act in any way while in uniform that would suggest the BSA would endorse the activity. Indeed, the national office issued a statement Tuesday affirming that the organization is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy and that the tradition of inviting the president of the U.S., as honorary president of the BSA, to speak to the National Jamboree is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific politics.

When I read Kenneth Kenistons fine book from 1968, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, years ago, it seemed clear to me that the young men (mainly) who organized the antiwar activities of the Vietnam Summer of 1967 and whom Keniston interviewed for the book could easily have been Eagle Scouts. It seemed equally likely to me that a Green Beret fighting the war in Vietnam could have been an Eagle Scout. Participation in the war or against the war could easily be justified based on the values learned as Scouts. The point is, of course, that the values and leadership skills learned in Scouting do not lead to any single partisan position.

The BSA managed to avoid political controversy for the first 75 years or so of its existence, but the rise of the culture wars in the Reagan years dragged the BSA into battles it would rather have avoided. The BSA policies barring gay boys and men, and atheists, from membership signaled on which side of the culture wars the BSA had landed. Those policies were rooted in religion, and although the BSA was not intended by the founders to be a religious organization but rather an organization open to all, the large number of Boy Scout troops sponsored by churches sustained a membership policy that really was at odds with the tolerance promoted by the BSA. Eventually it did change its membership policies, first, in 2014, admitting boys regardless of their sexual orientation, then in 2015 admitting adult leaders regardless of their sexual orientation. Most recently the BSA announced a policy of accepting members based on the gender identity they stated on their membership application, rather than the gender indicated on their birth certificates, opening the way for the first transgender boys to be Scouts. Though the culture wars have clearly not disappeared in 2017, evolving millennial attitudes about sexual orientation and gender identity have been transformative for the Boy Scouts organization.

Yet its incumbent upon the BSAs current leadership to ensure that the Boy Scouts are a force for good going forward. The event at the Jamboree reminded me of the moment back in September of 2016 when the Rev. Faith Green Timmons, pastor at Bethel United Methodist Church in Flint, Michigan, had to ask candidate Trump to stop turning his visit therewhich was intended to be a recognition of the role of the church in the Flint water crisisinto a Hillary-bashing campaign speech. Trump complied but then publicly excoriated Timmons the next day. So I could imagine the BSA senior leadership standing in the wings of the stage at the Jamboreeperhaps they had seen the written version of the speechcringing as Trumps asides increasingly turned what should have been a nonpartisan speech into a deeply partisan one. And none of those leaders had the courage to do what Timmons had done.

Join Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz as they discuss and debate the weeks biggest political news.

Then there were the audible cheers from some members of the BSA crowd listening to Trumps speech, which drove some critics to denounce the Boy Scouts writ large. I know that that Scouts for Equality had a presence at the Jamboree and their Facebook page chronicles their negative reaction to the Trump speech. Many boys were complaining that their troop leaders required them to attend the speech, against the boys own wishes. No, that crowd was not unanimous in its approval of President Trump, no matter the volume of the supporters.

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So the BSA has to issue an apology because the President of the United States is incapable of giving an appropriate speech to a bunch of kids. It's hard to believe this is really where America is. More...

But regardless, Id argue that these cheers should actually serve as a scary reminder of exactly why the Boy Scouts organization is important. The BSA, which was founded in 1910, early on aimed to take the natural instincts of adolescent boys and channel them toward positive, socially beneficial goals. Juvenile delinquency was causing a moral panic among American adults, and the founders of the BSA explicitlyif dubiously talked about the Scouts as the new, socially positive form of the boys gang, offering the boy what he craved as a teenager: a sense of belonging, comradeship, a distinct identity marked by uniforms and insignia, a sense of serving a larger good, and the satisfaction of helping others. These are needs that can be served by organizations espousing a politics of the left or right (hence the Hitler Youth analogy). The BSA tries to sustain a nonpartisan stance precisely because it wants to avoid the excesses adolescent boys are capable of.

The shouts of approval in the audience at Trumps speech confirm for me that adolescence is exactly what the founders thought it was in 1910a malleable time of life when teens and preteens are uniquely susceptible to both peer leaders and adult authority figures. One can hope that there will be a new president for the next National Jamboree in four years and that this new president will return to the tradition of delivering to the assembled Scouts a speech that brings out the best instincts in young people, instead of the worst.

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In Defense of the Boy Scouts - Slate Magazine

Jeff Sessions. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump may be bashing his attorney general left and right, but that hasnt deterred Jeff Sessions from deploying his bosss legal agenda. His latest rollback, on what now looks like a banner day for the Trump administration and LGBT rights, was the Department of Justices new position in court that federal civil-rights law doesnt protect employees targeted by anti-gay bias in the workplace.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the crowning achievements of the civil-rights movement, and by its very terms forbids employers from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Since the laws enactment, courts have understood the word sex to mean gender and not sexual orientation, and thus it became standard practice for judges to routinely dismiss cases whenever a worker alleged, say, that his employer denied him a promotion simply because the employer didnt like that the worker hung a picture of his bearded spouse in his cubicle.

In recent years, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which oversees enforcement of Title VII, began to see things differently. And relying on Supreme Court precedent that read existing law as forbidding things such as same-sex harassment and gender stereotyping, the agency started to push the argument that Title VII, indeed, may be read to also forbid taking adverse employment actions against gays and lesbians.

Advocates ran with this position, arguing for themselves and their aggrieved clients that federal employment law, if read the way EEOC and Justice Antonin Scalia read the law that is, textually makes it illegal to fire the gay worker with the framed picture of his bearded spouse. After all, a woman with the same picture frame and bearded husband wouldnt be fired. Thats classic discrimination on the basis of sex: The sex of the workers spouse is the bosss guiding light. And isnt the expectation that a man should only marry a woman de facto sex stereotyping?

In a landmark April ruling, an appeals court bucked precedent and ruled for the first time that the EEOCs position is the correct one. And other courts, including the Manhattan-based federal appeals court, are starting to give a fresh look at an issue they once thought was open and shut. Its in that New York case that Trumps Justice Department filed a brief opposing the view that Title VII protects gay workers. Its view is a familiar one: It should be up to Congress to fix the law if it wants to prohibit anti-gay discrimination. As written, the law just doesnt do that.

But for Sessions and his lawyers to prevail in this particular battle, they will be forced to contend with something their hero Scalia recognized for a unanimous Supreme Court in 1998: that what matters in the end is the laws text, not what Congress may have in mind at a specific moment in history. In his view, statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.

In other words, Sessions could well take a beating here as well. And the Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter of many of our culture wars, is already on deck to deal the painful blow sooner rather than later.

It does away with the individual mandate and defunds Planned Parenthood.

A bad bill designed to avoid scrutiny.

Their shared dark vision of the world unites them.

But the funding probably wont make it through the Senate.

The Dept. of Justices new position is that federal civil-rights law doesnt cover employees targeted by anti-gay bias

John McCain calls for bipartisanship, votes to prevent it from happening.

Reince is a f*cking paranoid schizophrenic. And so much more.

Anthony Scaramucci credited Trump with nailing 3-foot putts, but the White House transcript says they were 30-footers.

All the tactical brilliance that has kept unpopular and divisive GOP health care legislation alive disguises a fatal strategic blindness.

The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the GOP cant roll back Obamacares regulations without 60 votes. That makes skinny repeal more dangerous.

As Trumps religious-freedom envoy, Brownback has a chance to leave the state he wrecked and to take his religious views worldwide.

General Joseph Dunford wrote in a memo that there have been no modifications to the current policy.

Thinking it through before you vote for a huge change to the health-care system is for big-government liberal weenies.

It explains his otherwise inexplicable attacks on staunch ally Jeff Sessions.

Any effort to go after Muellercould be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, the senator said.

The R train may have been held in the station after a press conference.

The point of skinny repeal of Obamacare is to enact a bare-bones bill to shape in committee. Bulking up could be fatal.

Trump insists that his harassment of Sessions cant be obstruction because he has nothing to hide, is just doing all this out of pointless spite.

It will collide head-on with the doctrine of animus the legal principle guarding against singling out a group for harm.

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Jeff Sessions Takes a Stand Against Protecting Gay Workers - New York Magazine

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It's pointless for Democrats to try to downplay "identity politics." In President Trump's America, identity politics will come to get you no matter what. Indeed, fighting these old culture wars is just about all Trump has left.

That's a prime lesson of Trump's surprise Wednesday morning announcement that transgender people are not welcome to serve in America's military. In making that announcement, Trump usurped an ongoing Pentagon study into the issue apparently even catching the Defense Department off-guard and made a naked, cynical play to appeal to the socially conservative and otherwise traditional voters that make up much of his base.

"This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue," an unidentified Trump administration official told Jonathan Swan of Axios. "How will blue-collar voters in these states respond when senators up for re-election in 2018 like [Michigan Democrat] Debbie Stabenow are forced to make opposition to this a key plank of their campaigns?"

Get that? Even if Democrats want to avoid identity politics in 2018, Trump won't let them.

This ought to be clarifying. Ever since Trump won in November, Democrats have been mired in internal debates over whether they should downplay identity politics issues emphasized by their base of ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities in favor of a broader appeal to the "white working class." The underlying question: How much should Democrats turn their backs on the heart and soul of the party to win elections?

The debate seemed to be resolved this week when party leaders unveiled their "Better Deal" agenda to run against Trump and the Republicans in 2018. It contained some big promises a minimum wage hike, a crackdown on monopolies, apprenticeship programs, and more but notably skipped any issues that might seem to appeal specifically to black or brown or gay people.

Those voters noticed. That the agenda "never mentioned voter suppression, police brutality, immigration, or refugees felt like a low-key dog whistle to me," one observer wrote.

That "Better Deal" effort, however, lasted all of two days before Trump pulled Dems back into the culture wars.

"Transgender Americans are serving honorably in our military," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted in response to Trump's announcement. "We stand with these patriots."

Just when Dems thought they were out, they get pulled back in.

Good.

Why? Because Democrats can stop debating whether victory requires them to downplay strong stands for LGBTQ rights, for immigrants and against voter suppression policies that disempower African-Americans. Republicans are going to tie Dems to those policies anyway, so the party and its candidates might as well be forthright instead of coy about where it stands on those issues. Maybe Democrats could even trumpet their inclusiveness as a virtue.

This isn't 2004, when George W. Bush came out for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage a plain attempt to divide voters on culture war issues. In the years since then, gays and gay marriage have become increasingly accepted. If history is any guide, today's action will help Trump shore up his base in the short term and be irrelevant in another decade.

But for now, the culture wars will rage again. Trump can't pass a health-care bill (at least so far). Getting a tax cut looks like it might be tricky. The wall he promised looks no closer to reality than it did six months ago. There are real questions these days about whether Republicans are capable of governance.

In that climate, all Trump and the Republicans will have left are identity politics and the culture wars. It's why Trump after promising to be a president who would protect LGBTQ rights came out against them. It's why he spent a Tuesday night speech describing the crimes of illegal immigrants in torture-porn detail.

And it's the reason conservatives are cheering the prospect of Kid Rock making a Senate run against Stabenow; policy, these days, matters to them much less than all the "real America" virtue signalling that the entertainer provides. For Trump Republicans, that posturing is all that seems to really matter.

Identity politics aren't going away. Democrats might as well embrace it, fly their rainbow flags high, and fight back.

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The culture wars are all Trump has left - The Week - The Week Magazine