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While Biden as president has delivered on his promise to revert the White House to a policy-making and governing apparatus after its four-year stint as a clearinghouse for cultural grievance, the rest of American politics have refused to follow suit. A disproportionate number of this years hot-button political stories from cancel culture, to critical race theory, to the base-pleasing, antagonistic antics of House Republicans like Reps. Matt Gaetz and Madison Cawthorn have been less substantial political debates than attitudinal ones, about the public character of American life and our rhetorical treatment of its history.

The Biden presidency might have begun on January 20, but in nearly every other way that matters, the Trump era never ended.

The 45th presidents all-conflict-all-the-time mode of politics has stuck around past his administrations expiration date because, for one, it turns out that it just works. Consider Glenn Youngkins come-from-behind victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election, driven by animus over local school curriculums and hyper-cautious, blue-state attitudes about Covid restrictions, or the massive fundraising hauls of GOP hopefuls still largely following Trumps playbook of cultural grievance. Conservative media has continued its dominance by way of a series of ephemeral cultural skirmishes, over everything from Dr. Seuss to an imagined ban on hamburgers. Lets Go Brandon, the thinly-veiled anti-Biden epithet, became a common sports arena chant and cultural phenomenon. Debates over Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates long ago left the realm of the scientific, continuing to rage this year as a proxy for longstanding cultural disagreements.

The stubborn persistence of these conflicts reveals Trumps definitive political innovation. He didnt, of course, invent the concept of culture wars or grievance politics; city-vs.-country animus is almost literally as old as civilization. But where past standard-bearers in American politics would politely downplay that aspect of American life (while, yes, nudging and winking at the activist base it most intensely mobilizes), Trump placed it gleefully at the center of his political project, smashing the big blue Culture War Button on his iPhone until they eventually took it away from him.

So consider this an act of to borrow the term coined by the Washington Posts David Weigel pundit accountability: To predict a return of milder, early-Obama-era cultural politics was less sagacious analysis than an act of nostalgic wishcasting. But it was also understandable, given the lack of distance from Trumps presidency available at the time. Although probably not for the reasons he intended, history will deem Trump a transformational president. In breaking a taboo which other politicians had mutually agreed to leave alone, he gave Republicans a powerful political tool and by doing so, ensured the caustic, divisive cultural politics that defined his presidency would long outlive it.

Trumps inflammatory, cavalier attitude toward progressive norms and mainstream niceties is his political signature. But its taken on a full and uncontrollable life of its own: Look no further than his recent conversation with conservative YouTuber Candace Owens, who (gently) sparred with the president over his vaccine advocacy. In Republican politics, to contradict Trump is to invite almost certain harassment or political ruin. But the anti-establishment, folk-libertarian cultural ethos that fuels the anti-vaccine movement is such an ingrained part of the conservative bases identity that it resists such laws of political nature.

That Frankenstein-like phenomenon took shape in real time during the early months of the Biden administration, as conservatives tried a series of premises on which to wage Trumps culture war without him. There were the aforementioned controversies over Dr. Seuss and (literal) red meat; the endless Fox News segments about cancel culture; even 1990s-style pearl-clutching over a rap music video. Finally, a previously-anonymous political entrepreneur named Christopher Rufo devised, in his own words, a brand category under which conservatives could neatly lump all of liberals various cultural insanities: critical race theory.

This year, Rufos strategy was put to a de facto road test all stock disclaimers about thermostatic politics and off-year elections aside. Beyond pedantic debates about the definition and origins of the term critical race theory itself, the contest in Virginia tested the power of conservative reaction to the collection of liberal values artlessly lumped under that umbrella: pandemic-era risk aversion, shifting views on race and gender, and more broadly, the authority of government bureaucracies in defining and imposing those views. Its pure sophistry, but Rufos rhetorical strategy accurately identified a sea change in liberal cultural attitudes over the past decade-plus and galvanized the movement to resist it.

Theres an obvious peril in over-learning the lessons of a single election just ask forgotten contenders like Randy IronStache Bryce or Amy McGrath, who tried and failed miserably to persuade voters that Democrats could match the overheated working-class affectations of the Trump GOP. But what happened in Virginias gubernatorial election is a revealing test case for how cultural issues are keeping their place at center stage in American politics.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate and now Virginias governor-elect, was a mild, Mitt Romney-like private equity maven who emerged victorious from a party nominating convention glutted with Trumpian rivals who split right-wing activist support. After a decade during which Virginia seemingly transformed into a reliably blue state, it seemed he was likely to befall the same fate as its last crop of Republicans. Through late summer and early fall, polls consistently showed him trailing Terry McAuliffe, the states once and would-be-future governor and a veteran Clintonite.

The rest has already passed into political folk history: Youngkin transformed himself from a central-casting moderate Republican into a full-throated culture warrior, pouncing on McAuliffes tone-deaf remarks about parental involvement in schools and promising to champion the interests of Real Virginians over imperious liberal elites. Yes, the typical backlash against the ruling party in an off-year election was a factor as shown by Democratic incumbent Gov. Phil Murphys close call in New Jersey but Youngkins stunning reversal of fortune over the course of his campaign revealed the power of culture-war politics absent Trumps uniquely off-putting qualities. (For more on this, see Ryan Lizzas post-game interview in this magazine with Youngkin strategists Jeff Roe and Kristin Davidson who protest the sordid culture war label, but credit for their victory the very issues that lit up Fox News chyrons for weeks leading up to the election.)

And it isnt just the red-meat, rank-and-file Republican voter who has recalibrated their political philosophy for the culture-war era: The intellectual ecosystem of nationalist conservatives thats sprouted up over the past several years to add much-needed ballast to the Trumpian political project has taken its own approach to meeting liberals on the battlefield. In a wide-ranging profile for The New Republic that introduced its readers to The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right, National Review fellow Nate Hochman described to a reporter how a new generation of conservatives explicitly demands a more culture war-oriented Republican Party.

So what would that look like not just on the campaign trail, but in policy and legal practice? Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard law professor and influential thinker on the populist right, wrote in The Atlantic in 2020 of his desire for a court-imposed common good, defined by a respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to legislate morality.

The new-school national conservatives have their own (many) internecine disagreements, but no one is going to mistake the erudite conservatism of Hochman and Vermeule for the endless stream of Fox News segments about Mr. Potato Head or the War on Christmas. And the social conservatives eager to wage these conflicts often find themselves at odds with a far more culturally libertine Republican base. But the flourishing of a new, culturally assertive strain of right-wing politics that doesnt simply take the pre-Trump, McCain-Romney-Ryan status quo as a given reveals how much the former president expanded his movements horizons. For arguably the most anti-intellectual president of all time, Trump has in his own strange way let a hundred flowers bloom by breaking the cultural truce tacitly agreed to by his GOP predecessors.

Liberals, for their part, find themselves in an untenable and undesirable position on the other side of the trenches. More than a decade removed from Barack Obamas 2008 campaign the inescapably radical nature of which he aggressively downplayed, to the tune of almost 400 electoral votes the Democratic Party has undergone its own Cultural Revolution. In the wake of weaker-than-expected 2020 election results in many areas for Democrats, especially among minority voters, analysts like David Shor and Liam Kerr have persuasively argued that the uber-progressive cultural messaging of the partys donor class is far out of step with Americas mainstream, multiplying the effectiveness of the Trumpian approach. But whatever ones place on the ideological spectrum, without the true believers, theres no party apparatus, making moderation easier said than done.

Still, Democrats hold the levers of power with a trifecta in Washington, allowing them to overcome any sort of cultural branding deficit they might suffer in practice by delivering the legislative goods. Right? Well not necessarily. Political scientists Lee Drutman and Meredith Conroy recently wrote about the body of research showing how in the immediate term legislation and governance have quite little effect on the electorate, only revealing their influence years later when voters have the opportunity to pass judgment on day-to-day life in the world those policies have created. In other words: Even as Democrats have passed their long-awaited, popular infrastructure bill, and aim to pass another largely popular social spending bill in 2022, theyre more likely to be judged next November and in 2024 by voters intuitive evaluation of a society built by legislation passed years, even decades ago.

Its not an optimal position to be in for a party whose cultural vanguard is far outside the mainstream, and who doesnt have the benefit of Fox News grievance engine backing them up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But if theres any solace for liberals and anyone else who might lament the seemingly-never-ending Trump era, its this: On both sides of the conflict, the number of true janissaries is quite small. Biden won his narrow victory by identifying this, and correctly betting that a broad coalition of suburbanites, non-white voters and persuadable independents all sick of Trumps inflammatory approach would be enough to take him over the top.

In that light, the ultimate test of Trumps theory of politics might be his hypothetical 2024 re-election. Many pundits, myself included, have argued that Trump was a sui generis political phenomenon, his personal repellence and chaotic approach to the office being the key factors that united the Biden coalition. The Youngkin win and the close call in New Jersey, then as well as apparent weakness from far-left Democrats elsewhere reveal the power of a culture-war-fueled GOP, even or perhaps especially absent its idiosyncratic standard-bearer.

If Republicans make their expected big gains in the 2022 midterms and Trump runs his scorched-earth strategy again in 2024 and loses to a similarly-configured electorate, it would be even more persuasive proof that its not the strategy thats defective, but the man who invented it. In exposing his personal weakness at the ballot box even while re-invigorating the modern GOP with his transformational, combative approach, Trump might end up having notched one more unprecedented accomplishment before the end of his political career, at least by his own standards: to do something that benefits others above himself, however unintentionally.

Republicans are making hay in his absence, but they still face the tension of balancing a largely socially conservative activist and intellectual class with a live-and-let-live Trumpenproletariat that has little appetite for Moral Majority-style politics. Consider Floridas Gov. (and Trump-heir-in-waiting) Ron DeSantis, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the GOPs national pro-life base and an unpredictable, swing-y home-state constituency. The cultural cross-pressures in Democratic politics, meanwhile, become more glaring every day Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona recently blasted his party for the use of unpopular progressive jargon like Latinx on his way to a potential primary challenge against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Meanwhile, the looming Supreme Court decision that could overturn Roe v. Wade threatens to reconfigure half a centurys worth of cultural and political loyalties.

With last years failed prediction in mind, Ill refrain from making another one here. After all, its not really necessary: To look back at 2021, Trumpian cultural politics are no longer the ticking time bomb, or untested electoral strategy, or dangerous hypothetical that requires a more skilled analyst than myself to game out. Theyre just the way we live.

Originally posted here:
I Predicted the Culture Wars Would End in 2021. Oops. - POLITICO

The hostile tone that branded 2021 set in early in the year, when a mob in support of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol to disrupt Congress transfer of power to incoming President Joe Biden.

It cost Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, rioter Ashli Babbitt, and three other people their lives. Nearly 140 police officers were injured, dozens were disabled for months, and four later died by suicide, according to Capitol police reports.

More than 60 people in Florida have been arrested in connection with the attack, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Ramifications of the partisan warfare that manifested on that infamous day reverberated in Florida throughout the year.

Like millions around the world, Floridians witnessed the riot as it happened, many stunned to realize that dissent could erupt into something so fundamentally un-American. The insurrection failed, members of Congress resumed deliberations after spending hours in hiding, and Biden was certified as president.

But 147 Republican members of Congress refused to certify the election results, including most of Floridas representatives in the U.S. Capitol. It was a declaration of Trump-centered partisan warfare that persisted over the year and infiltrated state politics.

White nationalist groups prominent at the Jan. 6 riot such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers proliferated in Florida, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they sent representatives to a rally at Floridas Capitol on July 10 to protest the jailing of people they called patriots who have been arrested in connection with the insurrection.

The partisan strife throughout 2021 over the pandemic, racism, election integrity, academic freedom, gun violence, climate change, and much more was not violent as the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but it was corrosive and relentless.

Alongside COVID-19, which has killed more than 800,000 people in the United States, partisan hostility was a hallmark of 2021. Disputes over vaccines, face masks, lockdowns, freedom from public-health regulations, and the science behind the public-health response tracked the battle over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election that courts across the country said Biden clearly won and Trump clearly lost although Trump supporters both refuse to acknowledge it and fail to prove otherwise.

The best news of 2021 was the deployment of vaccines and treatments to tamp down COVID, which sickened and killed fewer people than in 2020 but continued to mutate into new variants. The rate of hospitalizations and deaths in Florida and elsewhere plummeted, thanks largely to the medical advancements, despite periodic surges in cases due to emergence of variants and resumption of public interactions.

Florida has suffered more than 4 million COVID cases and 62,000 deaths since the pandemic hit here in March 2020, many thousands of them coming after multiple vaccines became widely available for adults, according to state and federal health authorities. Later in 2021, COVID vaccines won approval for most segments of the population, including children. Widely available monoclonal antibodies therapy eased symptoms and speeded recovery for many COVID patients.

But even the deployment of medicines to fight COVID was not immune from partisan warfare.

Framing their stance as freedom from federal government overreach, Floridas Republican-led Legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked essentially all public-health protocols recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Legislature held a special session in November to adopt laws blocking mandates for vaccines and face masks in public schools, work sites, and other public places and further shielding businesses from liability for COVID infections among their customers, employees, and patients.

The governors political action committee sold campaign merchandise with the slogan, Dont Fauci My Florida, mocking COVID protocols recommended by infectious-disease expert and presidential adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci. In response to the governors ban against local policies to limit COVID infections, bumper stickers began to appear, saying, Dont DeSantis My Democracy.

Florida discord over the wearing of face masks made national news when local school boards, starting with Broward and Alachua counties, voted in emergency sessions to defy the governors order against requiring masks to be worn at school as the fall term began.

DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran insisting that mask-wearing is a parental decision, not a public-health matter punished the defiant districts financially, but the Biden Administration came to their aid.

Mask opponents attended the emergency school-board meetings in droves, often disrupting them. Anti-mask organizations such as Moms For Liberty were founded and mobilized by Republican operatives.

Florida voters favored Trump over Biden in the 2020 elections, though Biden won nationally. Republicans in Floridas congressional delegation continued to support Trump in 2021, voting against impeaching him a second time for his role in fomenting the insurrection and for failing to quell it while members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence were in harms way.

Many also continue to voice opposition to formal congressional investigation of what happened on Jan. 6, why, and who is responsible.

Three days after Trump lost the presidential race, DeSantis appeared on a national network to endorse the idea of Republican legislators refusing to certify Biden victories in their states and instead casting their electoral ballots for Trump. Floridas only statewide-elected Democrat, Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Nikki Fried, called DeSantis remarks irresponsible, destructive and inflammatory to a fragile nation.

Famously, the ex-president retired to his resort in south Florida and continues to play a national role in Republican politics, possibly to include another run for the presidency. His ally DeSantis is considered a possible running mate for Trump in 2024 and even a presidential candidate himself if Trump does not run again.

A year out of office, Trump and the Trump Organization face a series of investigations related to the Jan. 6 riot, alleged attempts to interfere with the outcome of the 2020 election, potential business fraud, and sexual assault allegations, as reported in CNN and JustSecurity, a litigation tracker hosted by Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

The congressional special committee investigating the insurrection, often cited as the Jan. 6 committee, has requested or ordered testimony and documents from high-profile Trump supporters such as campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who in August 2020 was arrested along with two Florida men and a third man and charged with defrauding Republican donors in an alleged $25 million southern border-wall scam.

Nikki Frieds office had investigated the purported charity at issue in 2019 and provided findings to federal investigators.

Trump pardoned Bannon at the end of his term. Brian Kolfage of Walton County, Andrew Badolato of Sarasota County, and a co-defendant from Colorado were not and faced prosecution.

Bannon defied the Jan. 6 committees subpoena and was charged with contempt of Congress.

In Congress, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida stood up for Bannon in regard to the contempt charge, after making national headlines himself along with former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg.

Gaetz has been under federal investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking ring involving Greenberg and underage teen-age girls. Greenberg negotiated a plea deal and is reported to be cooperating with Justice Department investigators, who gained reinforcement with two experts in public corruption in October, as The New York Times reported. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lucy Morgan bared some of the tangled backstory in the Phoenix.

In another Florida connection, Sarasota-based Cyber Ninjas, led by Trump supporters, was engaged for months by the GOP-led Arizona state Senate to audit presidential election results there that delivered fewer votes to Trump than to Biden.

The first-time election auditors who famously anticipated finding China-related bamboo fibers on ballots in Arizona uncovered no voting fraud. But the escapade cost Trump-friendly donors nearly $6 million and Arizona taxpayers $425,000, according to investigative reporting by Phoenix sister outlet the Arizona Mirror.

In October, Cyber Ninjas CEO and Sarasotan Doug Logan revealed by the Mirror to be a Stop The Steal advocate refused to testify before a U.S. House committee looking into the purported audit and its larger role in undermining voter confidence in American elections.

Throughout 2021, Florida Republicans continued to imply that voting by mail, done widely in 2020, facilitates voting fraud, and conspiracy theorists continued to rally around the discredited claim that re-election was stolen from Trump by election officials.

Florida Democrats and nonpartisan election supervisors disputed claims that Floridas 2020 elections were in any way seriously flawed.

Republican-sponsored election reforms framed as guardrails and adopted by the Legislature in Senate Bill 90 mirror measures in other red states that restrict access to voting, especially by mail, despite Florida being widely touted for running efficient, trouble-free elections in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic.

SB 90, sponsored by Sen. Dennis Baxley and Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a recent former chairman of the state Republican Party, is being challenged in federal court by the League of Women Voters of Florida and other voting rights groups. The critics call the reforms unconstitutional and designed to suppress minority voters, who in some parts of the state tend to vote Democratic.

Florida tracked other conservative states in fomenting culture wars that further polarized Floridians. Gov. DeSantis convened a special session of the Florida Legislature in November to pass his so-called freedom agenda, including banning local governing boards from mandating COVID protocols. One new law allows a study into the feasibility of divorcing Florida from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which labor unions looked to for help in making workplaces more COVID-safe.

During the special session, we will do everything within our power as a state to protect Floridians from the unconstitutional, un-American, and morally reprehensible overreaches on the part of the federal government, House Speaker Chris Sprowls and Senate President Wilton Simpson said in a joint statement of support.

Democrats such as Sen. Bobby Powell, who leads the Florida Legislative Black caucus, decried GOP attacks on so-called woke culture that seeks to reduce police violence against Black people, curb gun violence, address institutional racism, and expand voting rights, not restrict them.

For Floridians who look like me, or shades thereof, [the governors] agenda is decidedly unwelcome and anything but peaceful. Its about locking us up and locking us out, all while selectively plucking the words of Martin Luther King to somehow make this racist targeting okay, Powell said in written statement just before Christmas.

Its not okay to push what he calls anti-woke legislation thats a smoke screen for sanitizing history and erasing the lessons of the past, Powell continued. Its not okay to threaten teachers with litigation for simply teaching. Its not okay to muzzle those whose heritage was defined by Jim Crow or unleash those who have never moved beyond its hateful intent.

Over the objections of Democrats, the Legislature also passed an anti-riot law, House Bill 1, following Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, but civil-rights organizations are fighting it in federal court; a law purporting to crack down on Big Tech social media platforms that censored Trump for promoting the untrue conspiracy theory that he was cheated out of re-election; and a law to measure intellectual freedom at Florida universities that critics say is designed to stifle free speech and dissent.

Further, the DeSantis administration launched a fight with the federal government to block immigration policy that allows certain undocumented immigrants to be free on their own recognizance or under electronic monitoring while awaiting their day in the nations backlogged immigration court system. Arguing that some wind up in Florida, DeSantis wants the Legislature to give him $8 million to ship asylum seekers out of the state.

Those and other laws passed in 2021 face court challenges, making litigation against DeSantis and his allies another hallmark of the year. The League of Women Voters of Florida, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and other civil rights groups have led the legal battle against such measures.

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Year that began with partisan violence spawned culture wars and litigation in FL - Florida Phoenix

During the grimmest days of the First Crusade in 1098, the western Christians found themselves besieged by the Turks in Antioch. They had travelled more than a thousand miles from France, and countless fellow believers had died in the almost impossible trek across the known world; now running out of food and water, they were tired, hungry and desperate.

At their lowest point, and ready to give into despair, Christian spirits were raised by the arrival of one Peter Bartholomew, a poor man from Provence who claimed he hadbeen visited by the Virgin, promising them victory. The noblemen in charge were suspicious, as Peter was not only an illiterate farmhand type but also quite shifty, yet soon momentum built around his cause. He had an audience.

Peter had then dreamed he had seen the Holy Lance, the spear which had pierced Jesuss side on the cross, and apparently according to his vision was buried outside the citys church of St Peter. So off they all went, digging for hours in the June heat to find this object and prove victory was at hand; after several hours, the exhausted Frenchmen saw Peter suddenly appear clad only in a shirt and barefooted with a lance in his hand. He was proved correct, even if no one had actually seen him find it. Two weeks later, the crusaders won the Battle of Antioch, and the Provenal peasants triumph was complete.

Yet many of the those in charge were still sceptical, and the issue caused division among the crusaders, primarily along regional lines. The Franks as the Arabs called all crusaders were split between the Provenals and Normans, two distinct groups whose cultural and linguistic differences dated back to the Germanic conquest of northern Gaul and beyond. The Normans didnt believe Peter, because the Provenals did.

But the peasant was convinced of his divine support, and in order to prove it, he now announced that he would walk into a fire and emerge unhurt. The day came, the crusaders gathered, and Peter boldly stepped into the flame and died a few days later in agony (or at least, he perished soon after, and although the exact cause of death was unconfirmed, at the very least being burned alive didnt help).

Peter Bartholomew was displaying what evolutionary psychologists call CREDs, credible displays of belief or credibility enhancing displays, designed to build trust and reduce hypocrisy in a community. Peter talked the talk, but he also walked the walk, literally, although his particular case was extreme and unwise; the most typical CREDs are Ramadan or Lenten fasts, but the martyrdoms of early Christians like Catherine and Blandina had a huge impact on the religions rise.

CREDs are one reason why religious groups almost always beat secular rivals; religious communes last on average three times as long as secular equivalents, while neighbourhoods with higher church attendance also enjoy higher levels of charitable giving and social capital, and even faith schools have an edge which others cannot quite bottle, as one former Labour education secretary put it.

Ersatz religions dont have the same effect, and as the Nazis approached in 1941, even Stalin knew that no one was going to die for communism the whole point of communism is that you make other people die for your beliefs and so the churches were reopened.

People will not often make the same sacrifices for their political ideals as for their faith. Although modern progressivism clearly has many religion-like qualities, one argument against its continued dominance is that its followers arent willing to make CREDs, and so it will lose momentum as people begin to see it as upper-class self-interest repackaged in rainbow colours.

People are happy to pompously bloviate about diversity but theyre not going to give up their own job to make way for a woman or member of an ethnic minority. In the late 1960s, as Americas cities were consumed by violent crime, liberals fled in droves, withdrawing their sons and daughters from often-dysfunctional schools which had practised what they preached. They werent going to sacrifice their childrens happiness and safety for a political principle even if, they reasoned, that principle was good for the country as a whole. (Instances of conservative political hypocrisy are similarly boundless.)

Yet some people will make those sacrifices, the modern-day Peter Bartholomews of the culture wars. Just in August, five prominent talk radio personalities in the US died of Covid, having been vocal against either masks, restrictions or the vaccine itself. More recently, a well-known Italian anti-vax radio personality fell to the virus, as did a Dutch economist who thought Covid posed a minimal risk. Meanwhile in Britain, John OLooney, a funeral director and anti-vaxxer, was due to speak at an anti-vax rally but is believed to be in hospital with Covid.

Maybe these anti-vax media personalities dont actually believe their own shtick, and calculate that taking the Pfizer would ruin their credibility but how likely is that? An unvaccinated man in his 50s has about a 1-in-150 chance of dying if he catches Covid, and is much more likely still to be hospitalised, put in ICU and left prematurely aged. Is a career in media really worth that?

More likely, the people with quite wacky beliefs really do believe them, just as Peter Bartholomew genuinely came to think he could walk through the fire; he wasnt just doing it to own the Normans, or because of audience capture.

In the 1995 culture war black comedy The Last Supper, Ron Perlman plays obnoxious radio host Norman Arbuthnot, whom a group of liberal flatmates have invited over with the intention of murdering. They have already killed a climate sceptic, a Christian fundamentalist and a white nationalist, and now the shock jock is going to get it, too.

But Arbuthnot clearly based on Rush Limbaugh is so good at arguing with his progressive hosts that they waver in their intentions. Hes sharp, hes intelligent, hes sort of reasonable and, he admits, he doesnt actually believe half of what he says, he just does it for effect, to please his audience.

Ive heard that said a few times about Right-wing commentators; why would someone who was educated and not overtly stupid have all those obnoxious beliefs that could otherwise only stem from a lack of education?

Political debate is a status game, certainly, while hypocrisy is also universal, especially among journalists, but the chances are your opponents really do believe what they claim, and this applies even to areas that seem to defy logic. Just as the crusaders, and countless others involved in wars of religion, genuinely did believe they were carrying out Gods will, rather than, as so many historians would have it, it was all about power or some materialist explanation.

We should take peoples beliefs seriously yet those beliefs are often arbitrary. No doubt many Norman crusaders had a good old laugh at Peter Bartholomew dying of his burns, and the southern idiots who believed him, but had the humble mystic hailed from closer to Caen than Cannes they most likely would have believed him, too.

Peoples opinions tend to be tribal, and can change drastically to suit their partisan identity. New Conservative voters attracted by Brexit subsequently became more right-wing on welfare, for instance, while Republicans, formerly pro-free trade, shifted in large numbers under the influence of tribal leader Donald Trump.

In the US there is today a huge gap in vaccine uptake between white Democrats and Republicans, but could it have gone the other way? What would have happened had the vaccine been approved in October 2020, leading to a Trump victory? Although long forgotten, the politics of Covid realigned early in 2020, and vaccine politics could have gone the other way, with leading Democrats expressing scepticism about a Trump vaccine before the election.

White Democrats tend to be more educated, but the highly-educated are also prone to irrational beliefs theyre just better at articulating them. In Britain scepticism towards the MMR vaccine is most concentrated among highly-educated white urban neurotics, and ethnic minorities, the two core groups within the progressive voting block. Uptake is as low as two-thirds in Hackney, and not much more in Haringey, two areas with Labour super-majorities. Its not impossible that large numbers of white Democrats would have refused the Trump vaccine.

In an alternative universe, somewhere, there are progressive media figures dying to make some idiotic point about Big Pharma, metaphorically jumping in the fire. Whether the issue is winning the Holy Land or the Covid culture wars, many people would rather be dead than be wrong.

This post originally appeared on Ed West's 'Wrong Side of History'Substack

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What really matters in the Covid culture wars? - Spectator.co.uk

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Mike Antonuccis Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

The National Education Association has a long tradition of finding hidden cabals behind groups that place themselves in opposition to the unions agenda. In 2019, I chronicled the history of NEAs efforts, going as far back as 1998, and its report The Real Story Behind Paycheck Protection The Hidden Link Between Anti-Worker and Anti-Public Education Initiatives: An Anatomy of the Far Right. That report featured this elaborate flow chart.

The unions latest dispatch is a 3,000-word piece posted on its website, headlined, Who is Behind the Attacks on Educators and Public Schools?

It characterizes protests over critical race theory and COVID-19 safety measures as manufactured outrage by small groups whipped into a furor.

Whos holding the whip? Its a web of dark money and right-wing operatives looking to exploit culture war grievances for political gain by spreading disinformation.

But while NEA seeks to warn us of the actions of these conspirators, it has a typical blind spot about its own record of manufactured outrage, dark money and disinformation much of it present in its own article.

It quotes NEA President Becky Pringle: We must reject false narratives that distract and divide us, and come together to ensure that students have what they need to succeed. We should focus on addressing the educator shortage that has only grown more severe during the pandemic.

But an educator shortage that has only grown more severe during the pandemic is itself a false narrative, to the point that even an NEA state affiliate president noted that there is little evidence suggesting a mass exodus. To the contrary, most of our colleagues are staying.

To support its conspiracy theories, NEA cites a number of specialists and experts. One is Tim Chambers, who works for the Dewey Square Group.

The anti-CRT effort is textbook disinformation, manufactured and funded by right-wing think tanks and boosted by programmatically targeted ads to inflame users, Chambers said. It is from well-funded orgs working with suspect local groups on the ground, and with the ever-present background push from Fox News on broadcast and cable behind it all.

Unmentioned in the article is that NEA paid the Dewey Square Group $283,650 last year.

The article also cites the Center for Media and Democracy and Media Matters. Both have received six-figure grants from NEA, though not last year. The article omits the unions previous financial arrangements with these organizations.

NEA is also upset with efforts to recall school board members, particularly in the state of Wisconsin. It cites a researcher from the True North Research firm in Minnesota.

Left unsaid is that True North Research has its own transparency issues. The firm is headed by Lisa Graves, former executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. NEA and Graves were not always so put off by recall efforts, since both of them were instrumental in the failed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in 2012.

I dont believe people are chess pieces moved around by the high and mighty, but if they are, certainly there are players on both sides of the board.

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National Education Association Post Blames 'Dark Money' for School Culture Wars But Is Silent About the Funds It Pays Its Own Experts - The 74

Spains bullfighting season traditionally kicks off in February in Valdemorillo, a small town located approximately 40km outside of Madrid. It wouldnt usually attract big names, but in 2022, star matador Morante de la Puebla has confirmed his appearance. In a profession characterised by internal divisions, there is a growing sense that the coming season needs to be a success if bullfighting is not to disappear altogether.

Bullfighting has been banned in Catalonia since 2011, but in the rest of the country, the conversation has switched since the onset of the pandemic. Where once the debate focused on prohibition, the question now is whether a lifeline ought to be granted to this ailing cultural industry. The current left-wing coalition government appears not to have the political will to explicitly prohibit what was once known as the national fiesta, or, conversely, to provide support to keep it running. Hence, for example, tickets for corridas were pointedly excluded from a scheme announced by prime minister Pedro Snchez in October last year, whereby young people would be given 400-euro cultural passes to prop up various sectors.

Bullfights are reviewed in the arts rather than the sports sections of Spanish newspapers and fall under the purview of the Ministry of Culture. Declared illegal by the Spanish constitutional court in 2016, the Catalan ban was as much about political grandstanding as protecting animal rights. In the wake of the 2017 illegal independence referendum, the xenophobic and anti-immigration Vox party exploited anti-Catalan and pro-bullfighting sentiment in its campaigning and has become the third-biggest force in Spanish politics. Morante de la Puebla often joins party leader Santiago Abascal on the campaign trail.

But Vox has more to gain from the relationship than bullfighters, especially in rural areas where Abascals party has successfully attracted single-issue pro-bullfighting and hunting voters. The far-right has provided some protection for the profession, but it has also turned it into a more highly prized target. An increasing number of progressive citizens have a visceral dislike of bullfighting because it is seen as the last bastion for reactionaries with no place in a 21st-century European democracy.

In the cultural wars of contemporary Spain, the anti-bullfighting lobby is often too quick to brand aficionados as the cigar-smoking relics of the Francoist regime. Defenders of the national fiesta, meanwhile, preclude any debate on its future by dismissing all potential objections out of hand as manifestations of puritanical censorship. As a result, it is virtually impossible to have a serious debate on bullfighting, an emotive subject which has been weaponised by politicians across the ideological spectrum.

At the local level, city councils have no legal jurisdiction to issue a blanket ban, but they can withhold licences. In the northern coastal town of Gijon, socialist mayor Ana Gonzlez has announced the municipal bullring will from now on be used for live music rather than corridas. Her decisions came after, in her words, a line was crossed: two bulls killed last summer were named El nigeriano (The Nigerian) and another El feminista (The Feminist). The presence of Morante de la Puebla at the event gave this the look of a deliberate provocation, but was probably a coincidence. Fighting bulls inherit their names from their mother, so these monikers will have been handed down to the bulls from previous generations rather than having been thought of afresh. That said, exceptions have been made in the past. The first bull faced by the legendary Manolete as a fully fledged matador in 1939 had been baptised El Comunista (The Communist) under the short-lived Second Republic (1931-36). Such a name was anathema following General Francos victory in the Civil War (1936-39) and The Communist was diplomatically renamed El mirador (The Viewer).

Either way, the case is an example of how the bullfighting lobby has become something of an echo chamber. There is often a failure to understand how it is perceived from the outside. An open letter by the president of the Fighting Bulls Association was a gift to satirists, with its claims that the closure of the Gijon venue was somehow comparable to the destruction of religious artefacts by fundamentalists:

The Taliban, much like the Mayor of Gijon, forget that neither the Buddhas of Bamiyan nor the bulls belong to them, but are rather common heritage of mankind.

In Gonzlezs view, aficionados have had their way for too long, and now is the time to listen to the many citizens of Gijon who oppose bullfighting. In recent years, animal rights activists have organised large demonstrations outside of the bullring. During the pandemic, they have taken the moral high ground by staying at home while accusing the impresario of posing a danger to public (as well as animal) health.

Even ignoring the abolitionist movement, bullfighting is a broken business model. It faces particular challenges that will make survival even harder as the pandemic lingers. Spains premiere bullrings (Bilbao, Madrid, Pamplona, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza), have been largely inactive for two years. But with an ageing audience and some social distancing measures likely to remain in place, the return of corridas requires a sacrifice from matadors and breeders. They will have to significantly reduce their fees if impresarios are to break even.

There are fixed costs associated with bullfighting that make it difficult to do on a smaller scale. Tales of the demise in popularity appear much exaggerated when major corridas can attract 10,000 plus spectators, but a handful of elite matadors aside, fewer contracts are on the table as provincial rings close. Much like the pandemic, there will probably not be a specific day on which bullfighting ends, but it seems unlikely to thrive in its current guise for much longer.

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Coronavirus and culture wars: Spain's bullfighting industry faces a crunch point in 2022 - The Conversation UK