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President Donald Trump, flanked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., left, and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Wednesday during the unveiling of legislation that would place new limits on legal immigration. Evan Vucci/AP hide caption

No single issue has been a greater animating force for the Republican base over the past decade than immigration except maybe the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare).

And with the failure of GOP health care efforts in Congress and sliding poll numbers this summer, the Trump White House seems to be making a concerted effort to elevate cultural wedge issues, from immigration and a announcing a ban on transgender people in the military to affirmative action and police conduct.

"Trump has been under siege since he took office," said Brian Jones, a Republican political consultant and veteran of several presidential campaigns, "and the cumulative effect of his administration's missteps is an eroding approval rating, even among Republicans."

So Trump's team is rolling the dice, betting that if he can't get something done through the usual avenues in Washington, he can at least keep his base supporters fired up outside of it with a dose of the cultural grievance that helped get him elected.

When a president's back is up against the wall, what he's got left is his base. He can't afford to lose his most ardent supporters, so, often, presidents go back to the embers they stoked to fire up those supporters in the first place be they cultural or economic.

The poem that you're referring to that was added later is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty."

Stephen Miller, White House policy adviser, on the Emma Lazarus poem "The New Colossus," found at the Statue of Liberty that references "huddled masses."

Wednesday, the Trump White House backed a hard-line immigration proposal that would significantly curtail legal immigration. The move came less than a week after the Senate health care bill went up in smoke and on the heels of some other culture-war moves from the president.

Trump tweeted a call for a ban on transgender people in the military; the Justice Department put up a personnel posting attempting to staff an effort to sue for racial discrimination against Asian Americans in university admissions; and Trump suggested in a speech to police that they should be "rough" with certain suspects.

That is all red meat for his base issues that have historically played to white grievance.

Out of the hot focus of the legislative and Russia investigation headlines, many of these issues have been there since the start of the Trump presidency. One of his first major efforts was the travel ban that targets people from six majority-Muslim countries. And the Justice Department is working to try to cut off funding to so-called sanctuary cities, as well as urging prosecutors to seek the toughest sentences possible for nonviolent drug offenders, reversing Obama-era policy.

"I assume they're doing it because these are policies that the president believes will 'make America great again,'" said Alex Conant, a former Republican National Committee spokesman and veteran political operative, who worked for Marco Rubio's presidential campaign. "Politically, it could help him maintain a floor as his poll numbers continue to slide."

And this week, Trump received the worst numbers of his presidency. A Quinnipiac poll had the president at just a 33 percent approval rating with Republican support slipping.

"Speak English"

"Speak English," the president and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., one of the sponsors of the immigration legislation, said was one of their requirements for those who want to come to the United States. They also said these new legal immigrants had to have skills that could help the economy and that they had to be able to financially support themselves.

When confronted with the poem at the Statue of Liberty about welcoming the tired, huddled masses, White House policy adviser Stephen Miller told reporters, "The poem that you're referring to that was added later is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty."

The poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus was added in 1903, 17 years after Lady Liberty was dedicated. It was written by Lazarus 20 years earlier as part of a fundraiser for the statue. Lazarus was the daughter of a wealthy sugar refining family, but was taken with the plight of the immigrants and refugees with whom she worked. Her poem depicts the Statue of Liberty as the "Mother of Exiles." Lazarus' story and poem are featured by the National Park Service on its Statue of Liberty website.

The American immigration story for lots, if not most, is one of people coming to the U.S. with little more than the clothes on their backs "yearning to breathe free." Many are escaping poverty or war or simply seeking a better life, a chance to live a middle-class existence for themselves and their children.

It's the quintessential American Dream, that anyone can make it in the U.S.

The Trump administration argues that it is pushing forward with backing the legislation because it would be good for American jobs, especially for minorities already in the country, who cannot find work.

"Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been immigrants and, very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals," Trump said Wednesday in announcing his support for the bill. "And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to our workers."

That sentiment is real. Anecdotally, low-skilled laborers have traditionally been prone to skepticism toward new immigrants, who can be paid less. Businesses argue that Americans won't take the more dangerous, laborious work.

NPR's Amita Kelly fact checked the claim on Friday, finding mixed conclusions:

"Economists disagree whether or how much an influx of immigrants depresses wages. Some have found that new immigrants depress wages for certain groups, such as teenagers or workers with a high school diploma or less. Others say the overall effect on the economy is tiny, and an influx of immigrant workers vitalizes the economy overall."

(Kelly also dove into the specific research cited by Miller, the White House policy adviser who has been pushing this issue for years going back to when he was an aide to Jeff Sessions when he was a senator.)

It's been a similar story for years. The Washington Post took a deep look at this in 2013 and wrote:

"According to some experts, the flood of Hispanic immigrant workers in the past 25 years both legal and illegal has had a much smaller effect on employment patterns than other trends, including factory flight overseas, weakened labor unions and a spate of recessions.

"They also say that low-skilled immigration has been both a boon and a burden to America. It has squeezed public services but generated tax revenue. It has depressed wages in some areas but has revitalized ailing communities. The group that suffers most from the influx of new foreign laborers, these experts report, are earlier immigrants."

Proving divisive

It's not just the immigration push that's proving divisive. So are the other recent controversial, culturally focused steps taken by the administration.

The Justice Department says its affirmative-action effort is about "racial discrimination against Asian Americans," according to a Justice Department spokeswoman, who added that the department "is committed to protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination."

"Maybe now people will finally pay attention to something we Asian Americans have been talking about for so long," Joe Zhou told the Los Angeles Times. Zhou sued Harvard in 2015 on behalf of his son, who did not get in, despite being a valedictorian with a 4.44 grade-point average, near-perfect SATs and involvement in extracurricular activities.

But not all Asian-Americans feel that way. The advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice condemned the Trump administration's move and said it supports affirmative-action policies.

"Affirmative action expands educational opportunities for all applicants in a society where cultural and racial biases in testing and access to quality education deny many students equal opportunity," the group wrote in a statement.

It noted that affirmative-action policies particularly help "low-income and working class Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders."

Civil rights groups say affirmative-action opponents often focus on Asian-Americans for these kinds of cases as part of an effort to weaken affirmative-action policies more broadly.

"Since the new administration has been in office, it has been moving very deliberately to operationalize its nativist agenda with policies like this one," Advancing Justice continued. "Instead of attacking affirmative action programs, the Trump administration should use its platform to increase opportunities for all students while continuing to address the persistent equity gaps for low-income students and students of color. We support affirmative action and refuse to allow Asian Americans to be used as a wedge between communities of color."

Cornell William Brooks, the former head of the NAACP, said on CNN Wednesday that the Justice Department was looking for "ideological victims" and "racial bogeymen" that don't exist.

That's part of why, despite Trump's appeal to racial and ethnic minorities that legal immigration hurts them they are less likely to peel away.

These things are always a matter of priorities.

Trump's attempts to win over black and brown communities have often fallen short. "What the hell do you have to lose?" he asked in comments aimed at black voters at a campaign rally delivered to a largely white crowd in a white Wisconsin suburb.

Trump wound up winning just 8 percent of black voters in 2016, less than George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and barely more than Mitt Romney in 2012.

In reality, those appeals were also largely aimed at trying to keep the GOP voting bloc together, an effort to make Trump appear open-minded to white, suburban Republicans.

The impending ban on transgender people serving in the military, which Trump announced via Twitter, caught Pentagon leaders off guard. Some seemed none-too-pleased with it and appear to be breaking ranks with their commander in chief.

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft told a transgender service member, for example, he "will not break faith."

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Joseph Dunford issued a statement saying, "There will be no modifications to the current policy until the President's direction has been received by the secretary of defense and the secretary has issued implementation guidance."

Trying to stop the slide

The immigration legislation has little chance of passing in Congress. It doesn't have the support of 50 Republican senators, let alone the 60 total votes in the Senate needed to overcome a filibuster.

So why push this?

Narratives of health care failure and Russia investigations have dominated headlines and cable news over the past couple of months. And Trump's numbers have suffered because of it.

That Quinnipiac poll is hardly the only one. Every poll has shown a clear trend. Even Rasmussen, a polling outfit the statistical community frowns upon but the president pays attention to, had Trump at 38 percent Wednesday. Drudge highlighted the poll on its site in bolded and in red font this way:

These are historically bad numbers for a president. No one has been this low at the same time since polling began. But, in fairness, he also had historically bad numbers for any major-party nominee and still won the presidency.

That's important to remember, but it certainly didn't matter in the election, and it's not everything now. The actions the White House is taking and the issues the administration is pushing signal worries among the president's political team.

"Looking at this through a political lens," Jones said, "it appears these coordinated announcements are an effort to keep his core supporters engaged and on board the Trump train."

There are signs of bumpiness on the tracks. Trump won independents in 2016, but a late June NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, for example, found his approval had slipped 17 points with them since February.

His base, however, appeared intact. That may be changing. Traditionally, even in the worst of times, presidents retain very high support among their party. But Quinnipiac found a softening, a 10-point drop since June among Republicans saying they "very strongly" approve of the president. Barely a majority of Republicans said they "strongly approved," 53 percent, down from 63 percent two months ago.

"The trend is worrisome," Conant said.

Insider looking out?

Trump has begun distancing himself from congressional Republicans, referring to them as "they" and publicly shaming them for having promised action on health care for seven years.

But there's only so long a president can position himself as the "outsider." Obama certainly tried. He ran a re-election campaign partially on it.

Trump is at least now partly responsible for the legislative push and for making the argument for policies. That's something he has failed to do effectively. On health care, for example, he never got beyond boilerplate political talking points and engaged the public with any depth on the nuts and bolts of policy.

Yes, health care is complicated.

President Obama was steeped in policy and, on many issues, especially health care, he was his administration's best spokesman. But when there were failures, just like Trump, Obama blamed "Congress," all of Congress.

That infuriated his own party.

"The most important lesson I've learned, is that you can't change Washington from the inside," Obama said in September 2012, two months before winning re-election. "You can only change it from the outside."

For Trump, the blameless posture is complicated by the deal-maker persona he's created for himself. He wrote a book about it. Trump has pledged to make the "best" deals.

So far, though, he's dealt only with Republicans, making no serious push to bring Democrats on board. At this point, he's only at the threatening stage with Democrats.

Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, however, considering how Trump advocates making deals in The Art of the Deal. In one section, he imagines how he would have responded to a hostile takeover attempt that played out in a different company.

"I'm not saying I would also have won, but if I went down, it would have been kicking and screaming," he wrote. "I would have closed the hotel and let it rot. That's just my makeup. I fight when I feel I'm getting screwed, even if it's costly and difficult and highly risky."

That could explain tweets like this, sent in the wee hours of July 28, the morning after the Senate's Obamacare repeal effort failed:

"As I said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode, then deal. Watch!"

"Time to force the conversation"

The White House seems to see this culture push as good politics.

In the briefing room with reporters, Miller, for example, called the immigration legislation "enormously advantageous" and said it was "time to force the conversation on this issue."

He even explicitly mentioned "battleground states."

"Public support is so immense on this," Miller contended. "If you just look at the polling data in many key battleground states across the country that over time you're going to see massive public push for this kind of legislation."

That doesn't terribly sound unlike the unnamed White House aide, who told Axios this about the president's announcement of a ban on transgender people in the military:

"This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to take complete ownership of this issue. How will the blue-collar voters in these states respond when senators up for re-election in 2018 like Debbie Stabenow are forced to make their opposition to this a key plank of their campaigns?"

But, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disputed any electoral calculations behind the ban. Asked on July 26 if the decision had anything to do with trying to put pressure on Democrats in battleground seats, she said, "Not that I'm aware." She said it was all about "military readiness and unit cohesion."

A different official also told the Washington Post that the decision was about "military readiness and military resource decision." But, added, "It will be fun to watch some of them [Democrats] have to defend this, but that was never an impetus."

Some Republicans worry reviving the culture wars is the wrong place to focus to achieve the outcome this White House is looking for.

"The challenge is for every political action there is an equal and opposite reaction," Jones said, "and I think many Main Street Republicans, let alone independents, will bristle at proposals they consider to be exceptionally exclusionary particularly in the absence of addressing issues that traditionally animate the whole party, like tax reform."

More:
With His Back Against The Wall, Trump Again Turns To Grievance Politics - NPR

Wal-Mart v. Target.

Buttons v. elastic.

Pinot grigio v. Mountain Dew.

Culture wars.

We're hearing the term more and more to describe the political climate in this country; it's no longer Democrat v. Republican, liberals v. conservatives.

The gap is widening, not only along political ideologies, but culture itself.

As a country, we haven't all watched the same news for a while now; we don't drive the same cars, and half of us don't believe our bigger-than-a-parking-space SUV has any correlation to climate change because scientists and experts have an agenda (what that is, the rest of us still don't know).

Half of Republicans believe higher education is worthless, and consider the word "elite" dirty, even though they voted for a guy who literally has 24K gold wallpaper.

The state of our country has boiled down to this: PBS v. Duck Dynasty.

When Donald Trump tweeted that transgender people were now banned from serving in the military, the gap grew even wider, and if we're really talking culture, it's just a matter of time before restaurants tumble in and fall on top of news cable shows, bronze statues of Confederate heroes and freedom fries.

Therefore, I've done a bit of legwork so when the time comes, as in any day now, we know where we belong and can retreat immediately to those areas. We don't want to eat with you any more than you want to eat with us; may a stray fiber from a pussy hat never again touch a MAGA baseball cap back-to-back in adjoining booths.

It's time for some boundaries. Here you go.

THE RED ZONE

Fast Food (but not Arbys) Conservatives, waiting for your coal mining jobs to come back can make a man mighty hungry, so when its time to chow, feel free to head to any fast-food restaurant where you can get the most saturated fat for your money, with the exception of Arbys (I leave that one out for purely selfish reasons, as its my favorite). Feel free to toss that paper football of trash right out the window onto the highway because youre a goddamned American, thats why. I wont be there to see it.

Country Music More good news! Any food and drink establishment that plays country music is also your territory, as is the presence of sawdust on the floor. Is Natural Light on tap? Then youre in a Red zone, Trumpkin!

TV In the mood for something fancy? Any eatin establishment with a TV is now your territory, mainly because no restaurant televisions sets are tuned in to Masterpiece Theater or the News Hour.

Italian Food All Italian joints are on your list, too, because, well, most of their owners came from New Jersey, and voted for Christie (and still think hes doing a great job), but the most significant qualification was the Mooch. Sure, he only lasted in the Trump admin as long as it takes a mosquito bite to itch, but the penance needs to be paid. Its going to take more than a couple Hail Marys to cancel that sin out.

Bargain Pizza As far as pizza goes, if you have to cook it once you get home or get two large pies, a bag of bread and some pizza dough with chocolate syrup on it for dessert for under $12, place that call now.

Guns and Chains You also get every establishment that gleefully permits guns, has pictures of their food on their menu for easy deciding for those who have trouble with letters, and any grub hole that has more than two locations. That means Sizzler! SIZZLER! You get SIZZLER! I know, buried the lede, but I saved the best for last.

THE BLUE ZONE

Gay Waiters Now for liberals: All right, so you have relinquished spaghetti and meatballs, but guess what you get in return? Gay waiters! Thats right, any restaurant that has the best wait staff is now your home, because if the conservatives put their hush puppies where their mouth is, both of the ends of the rainbow can be found in Blue Land.

All Ethnic Food (Except Italian) Thats not all, folks! The in the liberal corner is all ethnic food except Italian. We even get German because of Angela Merckel! All Mexican is ours, and that includes every taco shop, bertos incarnation and mom and pop place. (Even the chains. I just rewrote that rule.) Let Trump build that Mexican wall, and watch as the liberals eat it away. Chinese. Japanese. Indian. Middle Eastern. Thai. Anyone that conservatives want to ban from this country is one more spice in the collection.

Organic If a restaurant uses even one organic ingredient, the liberals get it, as well as anything that serves chow and is on wheels, so give us all the food trucks.

Gourmet Pizza As far as pizza goes for this side: If there is fresh basil, homemade mozzarella and dough that isnt delivered in frozen little balls as tight and cold as Steve Bannons heart, its progressive. They prefer things to rise instead of thaw.

So, Im sorry, liberals, this guide probably rules out most fried food and places that serve you a loaf of bread as a free appetizer. But we all have to make sacrifices for the cause, whichever cause it may be.

And this doesnt mean you cant patronize the other side, but know it comes with risks.

For every visit to Cracker Barrel, liberals should expect a heaping helping of Prosecute Hillary talk while people buy snacks in the waiting area in order to survive until they get a table. To satisfy every craving for a chimichanga, conservatives must realize that there possibly an undocumented worker nearby, plotting to take their jobs.

Now go to your corners and eat.

Originally posted here:
Keep Your Crappy Pizza: Dividing the Spoils of the Culinary Culture Wars - Phoenix New Times

For the last two decades, the evangelical church in the United States has adopted a posture many refer to as purity culture, which praises the virtue of chastity and calls on all single young adults to pledge themselves to a high standard of sexual purity before marriage. This movement was especially pronounced in the late '90s, aided by a 1997 book by Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, published when he was just 21 years old. The book asks readers to consider a spiritual alternative to the secular practice of dating. Its massive popularity went on to directly and indirectly shape dating rules laid out by many evangelical parents, and in turn shape the relationships and habits of a generation of young evangelical readers.

Twenty years later, many 20- and 30-somethings still feel the effect of growing up inside purity culture. Online communities like the No Shame Movement give space to individuals to speak out about the harm physical, spiritual, mental, or emotional purity culture has caused.

In her 2015 book Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity, author Dianna Anderson explains some of the negative consequences of purity culture:

Many grew up being told over and over that their virginity was the most important thing they could give their spouse on their wedding night, only to reach that point and realize that having saved themselves didnt magically create sexual compatibility or solve their marital issues. Many soon divorced. Still others sat silently in their church groups, wondering what virginity could possibly mean for them as people who had been victims of incest or abuse or who felt attracted to the same gender.

Two years ago, Harris left his position as minister of the Covenant Life Church to study theology at Regent College. There, Harris met filmmaker Jessica Van Der Wyngaard, who was completing a master's in Theological Studies. Van Der Wyngaard was considering a documentary on issues of singleness and dating in the church, and after studying alongside students like Van Der Wyngaard, Harris developed a goal to revisit his book. He wanted to figure out what he still agreed with, while addressing the impact it has had on so many. As he completed a guided study with a professor, reading books that covered Christian culture at the turn of the century, he simultaneously began asking for public input from individuals, responding to tweets and emails from readers.

Fatherhood has also changed Harris perspective. One of Harriss daughters is now entering dating age.

We do learn through the agonizing journey of mistakes and heartache and pain, and I think that my impulse as a dad is to protect her from that, but I dont think thats realistic," Harris said. "I think you create a different set of problems when you try to protect yourself or your kids from that. I think what I want for her is to have rich relationships that begin with her relationship with God and flow into relationships with men and women with many different backgrounds and perspectives, and I want her to learn by interacting with lots of people the type of person she wants to be alongside in a committed relationship.

When Jessica Van Der Wyngaard arrived at Regent in her late 20s, she saw the issues around singleness that shed experienced at her home church magnified at the university level. Other single friends agreed to feeling pressured toward marriage or made to feel as if something was wrong with them.

What frustrated me was that so much of the dialogue around sexual purity, singleness, and dating was in the hands of the people who got married when they were 21, she said. And they dont know what its like to be in your late 20s or early 30s and single, and that dialogue needed to be expressed from someone that was in that position.

After discussing the documentary, Van Der Wyngaard and Harris agreed that a partnership made sense. Van Der Wyngaard would produce and direct a documentary that followed Harriss journey as he processed his first book and looking how the issues surrounding dating and singleness in the church have evolved over the past 20 years.

Theyre calling the project I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

One of the documentarys subjects, Debra Fileta, therapist and author of True Love Dates: Your Indespensable Guide to Finding the Love of your Life, explained her participation via email:

The past 20 years, so much of the conversation within the church has been centered on what not to do in relationships ... but there aren't enough people talking about how to do dating and relationships well. So many singles are going into marriage completely unequipped due to the lack of education and conversation that's happening about relationships in the dating phase I'm thankful to have a chance to be a part of this upcoming conversation.

Earlier this summer, Van Der Wyngaard launched a Kickstarter to fund the documentary so that they could release the film for free and make it a resource for churches. Van Der Wyngaard explained that she had been waiting for years for someone to engage in the questions she believes the film will ask. She decided that crowdsourcing, as opposed to finding organizational sponsorship, was a way of including others like her who were asking the same questions.

I wanted the conversation to feel for people like they were part of it, like they were owning part of this conversation and were on the journey with us, she said.

Some familiar with Harris first book are wary of donating to revisited project without a clear understanding of what its overall message will be. Poet and public speaker Emily Joy wrote on Facebook, Unless Joshua Harris is about to renounce the entirety of purity culture, from style to content, then he doesn't need a single dollar from us and he certainly doesn't need 38,000 of them to tell us that he meant well but just got a few things wrong.

According to her Facebook page, Joy is among the post-evangelical Christians currently leaving the church due to its hate-filled rhetoric and exclusionary theology. And in fact, one of the biggest challenges that Van Der Wyngaards and Harris project will face is that many of the individuals who survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye have left the evangelical church and are less open to hearing a conservative response.

Harris says he anticipates this.

Its understandable that people want to know exactly whats going to be said before they fund something, he said. And he says that he and Van Der Wyngaard are still approaching the topic from a conservative stance.

We think we have a chance to encourage a humility and a respect which we recognize that different people would say, Well that falls so far short of where you need to be, but were trying to be realistic about where we are and who we can speak to at this point, he said.

The entire scope of the documentary is still a work in progress. While they know that they cant address all issues around sexuality for instance, they do not plan on tackling topics like sexual orientation or pornography head on they are interviewing individuals like Debra Hirsch, author of Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations about Sexuality and Spirituality, who is already asking them provoking questions that broaden the conversation.

If their Kickstarter is not funded, the project might not come to life as it is laid out, but both Harris and Van Der Wyngaard are still committed to producing a free public message. Just where the conversation will go, theyve yet to figure out.

Continue reading here:
Beyond the Purity Culture Wars - Sojourners

Left vs. Right.

Liberal vs. Conservative.

Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty.

Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life.

Evolution vs. Creationism.

These are the culture wars of my generation. This the rhetoric woven into the evangelicalism of my upbringing. In just about every battle, Ive fought hard on both sides, first on the right and now on the left, and Im not sure which was harderdigging my heels in on either side, or making that painful transition from one to the other.

Photo byJason RosewellonUnsplash

However, as I consider ushering my children into a better faith, I want a spiritual landscape for them that isnt set up as binaries. I think, maybe, the problem isnt which side theyll take but whether they should be forced to choose at all. Because ultimately, I dont think engaging in warfare is the best way to live in the world. I prefer we pave a path for our children to live out their vision; to create art as resistance, to make beauty as a rallying cry, and to walk in their truth with intention.

Its important to not recruit our children for our culture wars because our culture wars are particular to our context and irrelevant to their modern sensibilities. We dont know yet the issues that will plague their generation, it may or may not be the same ones that troubled our times. If we equip them with rhetoric to fight our culture wars, they will go armed into a battlefield where no one shows up. I see this in the way some young adults who have learned anti-LGBTQ dogma in the home entering into a political landscape where that contention is already over. Gay marriage equality is the law of the land in the U.S. and slowly spreading in other areas of the world.

This is not to say we do nothing to prepare our children to engage with critical issues of their time. Not at all. Unfundamentalist parenting is to raise critical thinkers who will continually interrogate all perspectives. Parents, just be prepared that this means we have to make space for them to interrogate our own treasured positions as well. My kids sometimes threaten me (jokinglyfor now) by saying they might adopt fundamentalism, and I have to be willing to give them their own agency. Now, I am fairly confident they wont, because I do everything I can to compel them, not with force, but with love, and I believe love wins. But love always liberates our children with autonomy to choose freely.

What I hope to teach them is that there is nothing beyond critique. Every position, every voice, every movement has blind spots and to expose blind spots is to help ourselves grow in integrity and contribute to bettering our world.

But most importantly, I want to raise children who learn to connect meaningfully with others in an increasingly pluralistic world. The most fundamental problem with culture wars is the way it severs connection, separating people from ideas, and driving each tribe to retreat into a small ideological enclave.

This does not mean we raise children to be wishy-washy moderates who are people pleasers without a backbone. On the contrary, the best way to engage meaningfully with others is to present oneself as whole and complex human beings, filled with passion and conviction. Encourage their fire when our children align themselves with specific causes, even ones we may not agree with, because it means they are actively taking up space with who they are. But this means we all, us and our children, need to allow other whole human beings to fully be present as well.

The greatest lie of culture wars is that we have to hide aspects of ourselves because our ideas are too polarized and conflicting. If there is a war we must take on, it is to counter this falsehood, in order that our children can live in a world where each one of them can present themselves as whole, complex, evolving people. That they can intersect one anothers paths as fully themselves, interact with one other with passionate conviction, and part ways having built one another up instead of tearing each other down.

So dont. Dont recruit our children for culture wars.

Lets make citizens, not soldiers.

Get a free downloadof a Christian parenting manifesto that helps us guide children into healthy spirituality + the most helpful parenting resources with progressive values.

Go here to read the rest:
Don't Recruit Your Children for Culture Wars - Patheos (blog)

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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