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Theres an empty stretch of field off highway 141 in Colorado that used to be the perfect American town. Small houses with white picket fences boasted big flower gardens. Kids played kick the can in the streets, rode their bikes, splashed in swimming pools. On Sundays, they might have watched an Elvis movie on TV. The rent was cheap, the fathers all worked, the mothers stayed at home.

Uravan was placid, friendly and, in most of the ways people usually measure it, safe. For many years, a former resident recalled, there was no law enforcement in the mining company town. Nobody needed it. The kids were good kids, because if they werent, the company bosses would kick their whole families out.

The town, named after the minerals extracted and processed there, had secretly supplied uranium to the Manhattan Project during the war. Afterward, the cold war uranium boom made the town prosper.

Things changed in 1986 when Uravan was declared a Superfund site contaminated by hazardous waste. The mine closed, residents moved out. The entire town the trees, the houses, the post office, the Coke glasses from the drug store was shredded and buried in a concrete-lined hole. The only thing left behind was the towns metal flagpole, which was moved to the abandoned baseball field.

When they bury your whole town, they bury your history. Theres a little bit of shame to that, said Jane Thompson, who grew up in Uravan. Her parents were the second to last family to move out.

Thompson drove me through Uravan early one Sunday morning, pointing to the dip in the ground where the gas station had been, the block of houses where she had grown up. There was nothing left except scrub, battered earth and fences with signs warning, Caution Radioactive Materials.

Thomas and her family now live just down the road in Nucla, a shrinking rural town still dependent on the mining industry.

Nucla became nationally famous when it passed an ordinance requiring every household to own a gun five years ago a move that is still wildly popular among residents. But past Nuclas one minute of fame, locals worry about their beloved home becoming a ghost town.

In September, in the wake of a lawsuit from an environmental group, Nuclas major employer, the local coal-fired power plant, announced that it would be shutting down in 2022. The coal mine that supplied the plant would be shutting down as well. In total, about 80 jobs were at risk a huge number in a town whose population boasted, according to the 2010 census, only 711 people.

For locals, this decision was a death knell brought on by liberals who live in big cities. Nucla residents bristle at the warnings about the risk of exposure to radiation, and roll their eyes at A-listers like Darryl Hannah, the Hollywood actress known for Splash and Kill Bill, who joined the activism against the local uranium industry.

Liberals fighting against the mining industry are good at telling them no, residents say, but dont present them with any alternatives not ones that come with real salaries. Richard Craig, a former Nucla town board member, recalled a comment by a member of an environmental group saying during one of the contentious hearings: Well, I dont see why they dont want to go live in the city.

Its almost like I hate using this word, its being used so often its almost like a conspiracy: We need to move everybody out of rural areas and go live in the cities and suburbs, Craig said.

Nucla made national headlines in 2013. That year, in the wake of the Sandy Hook mass shooting that left 20 first-graders dead, Colorado passed new gun control laws, banning the sale of new ammunition magazines with more than 15 rounds and requiring that private citizens perform criminal background checks before selling guns to each other. The laws were hailed by gun control advocates nationwide as a sign of progress despite the gun debate stalemate in Washington.

Nucla moved in precisely the opposite direction: it passed an ordinance mandating that every head of household had to own a gun.

Kennesaw, Georgia, had passed a similar ordinance in 1982. After Craig heard about it, he proposed the idea in a town board meeting. It was kind of a joke to start with, he said, sunk deep into the blue plush chair in his cluttered living room. But the reaction from other town board members was immediately positive. Nucla locals, who had been fighting with liberals for years over uranium and coal, loved the idea.

They said, That sounds cool, he says. I went, Uh-oh.

Craig received congratulatory phone calls from gun rights groups across the country, and the town took the national media attention in stride. Locals still talk fondly of the controversy over the towns prairie dog shooting contest in 1990, which attracted dozens of animal rights activists and made the pages of People magazine. (During the shoot, the Los Angeles Times reported, picketers chanted What are you gonna shoot when the prairie dogs are gone? and a local woman called out: Protesters!)

Craig himself saw the ordinance as responding to yet another irrational liberal attack on rural jobs. After Colorado passed its law on magazine limits, Magpul, a company that manufactures firearms accessories, left the state of Colorado in protest for Wyoming, where it reportedly expanded its workforce and secured a lucrative contract to provide ammunition magazines to the US marine corps.

But he was dismissive of Barack Obamas controversial analysis during his 2008 campaign that small-town residents get bitter and cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who arent like them as a way to channel their frustration. The jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothings replaced them, Obama had said. And each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.

Craig maintains that Nuclas love of guns is not rooted in bitterness. Even before the new rule was approved, most people in Nucla were already gun owners. The ordinance itself contains broad exceptions, not only for felons and those with a mental illness, but also for people who cannot afford a gun or simply wish to be conscientious objectors. This makes it more or less unenforceable.

Still, Nuclas commitment to gun ownership is no joke. Theres a tiny pink sign decorated with pistols at the local sheriffs department it reads: We dont call 911. The town has no bars, no liquor stores, no movie theaters or malls, but it does have its own public gun range, free for use by all.

The few local Democrats are no exception, including Craig himself and the local pharmacist, who was a prize-winning competitive shooter in college. Nuclas historian, Marie Templeton, keeps a beloved gun her husband gave her as an anniversary gift.

Im sure that the people who live in cities have no conception of what a gun means to a person in a small town like this. What do you use a gun for? Well, you kill rattlesnakes, for one thing! she said. She got up from her kitchen table to fetch a stack of photographs of mountain lions and bears that had been spotted in her neighbors yard.

The ordinance didnt even faze Shirley Miller, an Englishwoman who moved from Essex to be with her American husband. She said her adjustment was easy for the most part. Coming from a small village to the east of London, Great Wakering, she finds small-town England and small-town America mostly alike, except for Nuclas blazing, dusty summers and, of course, its bounteous guns.

That aside, Nuclas culture is not so different from small English villages, Miller said: the lack of diversity; the mix of open-mindedness and old prejudice among the residents. There have been small adjustments. She imports her Tesco and Yorkshire tea by mail, along with the occasional package of sultanas and Marmite, and each year she lets a friends sheep graze in the empty pasture by her house, adding a nice pastoral touch to the property. She refuses to say a word against the gun ordinance.

People who live in cities have no conception of what a gun means in a side town like this

Although I come from a culture where there are no guns, and its different here, I dont see the problem here in Nucla, she said diplomatically. If I were living in the city [these gun laws] would worry me. Here it doesnt, she said before adding wryly: There is no crossfire here.

Even the towns emergency medical technician the major healthcare provider in the area during the night, when the local clinic is closed said he carried a gun, as did the ambulance driver. The EMT, Jeff Stephens, said the ambulance had been held up twice.

Last November, officials said, a heavily armed man with a history of anger at law enforcement opened fire on a sheriffs deputy while he was driving in a remote area not far from Nucla. The officer returned fire, killing the man. A local prosecutor found the officers actions justified.

But that shooting was an anomaly for the area. Prior to that, the last violent shooting was in 1986 or so, Stephens said, when a man tried to break up a fight between a man and his wife outside a bar in Naturita, the town next door, and was shot to death.

Stephens said he does see occasional firearm accidents. There were two in recent memory: one a man shooting himself in the leg, another a young man shooting his partner in the knee. Both shootings involved alcohol, he said.

Word travels quickly in a town of a few hundred people. I had given Craig, the architect of the gun ordinance, a call in advance of my trip to Nucla, and shortly after I arrived in town he tried to reach me on my cellphone. I didnt immediately pick up, so Craig called the front desk of the hotel one town over, and a hotel employee dashed downstairs as I was starting to eat lunch. She handed me a fluorescent post-it note: it had Craigs name and home number on it.

By my third day in town, a woman stopped me outside of Nuclas one restaurant, the Fifth Avenue Grill, to recommend someone for an interview. Had we met the day before? I wondered, confused. We had not. But she had heard all about me already.

Later that day, a stranger in the burger joint one town over, a 1950s-style diner run by Seventh Day Adventists, broke into my note-taking to warn me that I had better be writing a nice story. I pulled up a chair to his familys table. His son was just hoping the jobs would hang on long enough for his daughter to graduate from high school.

Many of the residents were no strangers to the boom-bust cycle of the mining industry. Its always been boom and bust, they told me, for the past hundred years. Sharon Johannsen, Jane Thompsons sister, had been forced to leave town during a mining slump. Her family had only been able to return many years later, but her husband was now working at the coal mine that was slated to be closed.

Many end up moving away for good, but the ones who stay or return are fiercely committed to the landscape and the isolation, the need for self-reliance. The nearest Walmart is more than two hours away. On the mile marker partway down the winding 100-mile road that leads to the closest hospital, locals have tied a pink ribbon to commemorate the place where a healthy little girl had recently been born.

Grand Junction, that nearest larger town, has a population of just over 60,000. Several Nucla residents told me, with disgust, that they could not imagine living in a town that big, and some said they tried to visit as little as possible. Multiple men confided woefully that Nucla had a hard time attracting managers for certain jobs because their wives could not bear to live so far away from a shopping centre.

Today, western Colorado is perceived as a conservative region. At a Blues in the Park night in Naturita, a stranger visiting the town, red-faced and somewhat inebriated, cornered me and began ranting about freeloading immigrants and American values.

This country wasnt built by socialists! he told me.

Actually, I said politely, this area, right here, this was built by socialists.

In 1893, a financial crisis devastated thousands of companies and caused the unemployment rate to spike above 10% for several years. Workers lost their homes and families went hungry. According to one history of the town, a group of Denver families who had become homeless and who were united in their wish to escape tyrannical landlords provided the impetus. In 1894, a group of 10 idealists in Denver formed the Colorado Co-Operative Company, with the goal of moving into the wilderness to create a new community a place where equality and service rather than greed and competition should be the basis.

The utopians spent nearly10 years digging an 18-mile irrigation canal through the arid landscape to bring water from the San Miguel river to the dry hill where they planned to build their colony. Money was tight, food scarce and the workers labored for shares in the eventual water rights in the canal they were digging by hand. To outsiders, the whole plan seemed like madness: how could anyone build a major irrigation canal without any capital?

To expand their group of workers and supporters, the cooperative society established a newspaper, the Altrurian, to share news about their progress nationwide. It covered the day-to-day debates, including updates on the type of cabbages and lettuces that had been planted to feed the workers, as well as features on vegetarianism, marriage and violent labor strikes in other states.

The paper advertised in-person cooperative club meetings across the country, including in Brooklyn, and was not too proud to beg for subscription pennies. If you have received one cents worth of information from this weeks Altrurian, and are not already a subscriber, can you not afford to be a subscriber? it prompted.

When the ditch was finished, the utopians named their town Nucla after the word nucleus, a strange premonition of the towns nuclear future. Socialism broke down only a few years later. In 1914, Nucla voted down its single tax system, in which the cooperative company owned all the land in town and paid one tax on it to the government, in favor of private ownership.

Today, Thompson argues, its the labels on the towns politics that have changed, more than the values themselves. The old-school cooperative mindset really maybe has more to do with conservatism than we think: independent, not needing the government, not needing a landlord, not needing a boss or a big corporation.

The ditch is still owned and managed collectively by the Colorado Co-operative Company, which the utopians founded in 1894. It has about 170 shareholders, and in the summer, group meetings have to be held late in the evening to make it easier for local ranchers to attend after work.

Monte and his son Dean Naslund have a strong connection to the ditch: five generations of their family have worked rebuilding and maintaining it over the years.

I drove out with Dean late one morning, after the days first real work had been done. The ditch was unlined, just a channel dug in the dirt, 16-20ft wide at the top, carefully designed to flow downhill all the way from the San Miguel river to Nucla.

Naslund stopped periodically to use a pitchfork to clear branches out of ditch gratings. The back of the pickup was filled with tools, mixed with old chunks of red-and-black rock fossilized dinosaur bone, Naslund said. Golf balls sit near the front seat. He finds them floating down the ditch from Telluride, I suspect.

Golf balls arent the only trace of the liberal resort town that end up downstream in Nuclas water.

Theres been a few people who say they found some other things from Telluride, Naslund said, and paused. Sexual endeavor things, he added, delicately.

Telluride, just an hour away, is Nuclas polar opposite. The town, which hosts a film festival, is cosmopolitan and populated by the elite, a favored site for second or even third homes. Oprah Winfrey reportedly bought 60 acres of land there in 2014 and spent $14m on one of the towns most lavish mansions (it has a wine cellar designed to look like a historic mine).

To make ends meet, Nucla residents clean Tellurides rental condos and help construct its elaborate mansions, with their enormous chandeliers and granite toilet seats and computerized bidets. One Nucla resident recalled walking into a bathroom in Telluride and feeling startled as the toilet opened by itself.

The class tensions between the two towns are exacerbated by stereotypes. Telluride people think the small towners exposure to radiation means they cant think properly, said Kyle Webb, a 28-year-old who had moved from Denver to Nucla, in part because of its gun ordinance.

Meanwhile, the avowed environmentalists are building giant mansions with heated driveways to melt the snow. Telluride is so wasteful and its kind of hypocritical, said Aimee Tooker, Thompsons niece and the the president of the West End Economic Development Corporation, which was founded to help build new economic models in the area.

Its the saddest thing. You know, we turn off our lights. And as long as we have a place to plug in our phone and our TV, were happy. Those people that are up there they have rain sensors in their windows and sun sensors in their shades so that the shades will close automatically.

Theyre the most wasteful people, yet they tell us that, you know, we cant have our uranium, we cant have this and that down here.

Theyre the most wasteful people, yet they tell us that we cant have our uranium, we cant have this and that down here

The two communities especially clashed during the push to reopen a uranium mill near Telluride, a raging fight that started around 2009.

Hilary Cooper, a Telluride resident who was then the head of the Sheep Mountain Alliance, a Telluride environmental group, was one of the leaders who geared up to fight the uranium mill.

I kind of jumped into those communities thinking, oh, we can talk some sense into these people: all the medical research and how bad this stuff was for them and how bad it was for the environment, Cooper said. She knew the environmental arguments might not be as powerful, even if she stuck to the simple talking points of clean air and clean water. I could not have been more wrong in my approach, she said.

Her activism sparked outrage, and she said she received threats on her life.

The children and grandchildren of Uravan miners had seen some of them die of lung cancer, but they never missed an opportunity to explain that they had been smokers too. The direct links they saw between exposure to uranium and cancer did not persuade them that uranium mining was a bad industry, especially with what the saw as more recent advances in safety.

Thompsons grandfather, who used to smoke and mine at the same time, had died of lung cancer. The local history museum has a photo of him smoking insouciantly while wheeling a cart of ore out of the mine.

If you had told my grandpa that he was going to die when he was 70 a horrible, painful death, he would have continued to mine, Thompson said. Thats how he supported his family and he was able to keep his family farm.

As an alternative to uranium, Telluride residents repeatedly suggested that Nucla and Naturita capitalize on the organic local food movement and return to their farming roots to provide Telluride and surrounding areas with produce, Cooper said.

This suggestion was met with eye-rolling and frustration. Ill be the first person in line to pick your tomatoes for $45,000 to $75,000 a year, one local reportedly said in 2009, contrasting agricultural wages with mining income. Years later, Thompson still scoffs at the mention of organic produce. Her grandmother grew her own food and canned it, and never used pesticides. This is our way of life, she said.

After several years of angry public hearings, lawsuits and debates, the uranium project has been put on hold for economic reasons. In Nucla, where the spot price of uranium is printed on the front page of the newspaper, locals say it needs to reach $50 for the mill to be financially viable. The price listed on the paper in late June was $19.85.

Telluride says a lot of dumb things, said Paul Major, the president of the Telluride Foundation, a community philanthropy. You know, its easier to sit in Telluride and yodel about going green, and a community like Nucla is going, What are you talking about? Were just trying to put food on our table and a roof over our heads.

It was not easy for people working in information industries, or in tourism and real estate, to understand what it was like to be dependent on extraction industries, he said.

If you had told my grandpa he was going to die a horrible,painful death at 70, he would have continued to mine

Thompson said that during a tour of Urvan for Telluride schoolchildren, their teacher asked her: So how do you kind of live with yourself, knowing that the town where you grew up in is where the bomb came from that killed all those people in Japan? Thompson said: And I just looked at him, like, are you just stupid or are you just rude? What kind of question is that?

My grandfather was a farmer, he was a kind and gentle man that wouldnt hurt a fly ... He had no idea what he was doing. None of them knew what they were doing.

I had a hard time with that man even asking me that question.

Cooper, who was recently elected as a county commissioner in a neighboring county, representing Telluride, said she has learned the limits of the towns helpful suggestions.

Telluride is very well meaning in a patriarchal kind of way. Weve got all kinds of ideas about what would be good for the West End. Unless it comes from within the West End, our ideas are not going to fly there, she said.

She thought some of the criticisms of the resort town have merit. I, too, am frustrated with Tellurides energy use and with the 19-bedroom second homes that are still consuming energy when nobody is in the house year round. That said, dont let that stop a good idea from happening. Dont use that as an excuse not to move forward with something that would help your community.

Lacey Steele, a Nucla native, has been commuting to work in Telluride since she was 15 and now works at a Starbucks there. At 21, shes starting a family and getting ready to have a baby. Everybody there looks down on it young marriage and young families, she said. Shes one of the only people at work whos preparing to have children at all.

She sees an imbalance of power even in the way the residents of the two towns think of each other. I dont believe that a lot of people in Telluride know what goes on around here. A lot of them dont even know where we are. And some of the work its millionaire tourist economy offers has real drawbacks: its seasonal, which means Steele is laid off twice a year in the spring and fall and then re-hired.

Laura Denney, a Nucla resident who does private housekeeping in Telluride, said there is an amazing difference in lifestyles between the two towns. At the same time, she said, the families she worked for were really down-to-earth people who she saw give back to the broader community. She pushed back against the negative views of Telluride residents in Nucla.

A lot of people still have that feeling: Theyre just a bunch of hippies up there, just a bunch of rich people. You know what? It was the hippies that made Telluride rich ... If it wasnt for the people in Telluride, a lot of us here in Nucla, Naturita and Norwood wouldnt have jobs.

Residents of Nucla do have this really strong attachment to their culture and their history, Cooper said. Over the years, shes come to believe that attachment is mixed with shame. The history of Nucla is not taught in schools, its not shared ... Theres a conflict of being both ashamed and being proud of it and I think in some ways that is what has really kept that community from discovering whats next for them if its not uranium.

Jeremy Nichols, the climate energy program director at WildEarth Guardians, the not-for-profit whose lawsuit led to the closure of Nuclas power plant, is unabashed about his goals. We want to shut down all coal-fired power plants. We want to keep all coal in the ground. We have a moral imperative to confront the climate crisis, and we cant afford to say, Its OK for this power plant to run and not the others.

The scheduled shutdown is an uncomfortable situation for sure for them, he said. But the timeline, and the deadline, also have benefits, he argued. They provide certainty about something that was already going to happen, and cut through the rhetoric that might suggest, inaccurately, that coal is great and its going to go on forever and if anybody says otherwise, theyre lying.

The town has to take responsibility for planning its own future, and for the lack of planning in the past. Its a beautiful landscape, but its stuck in an old economy, and the old economy is going belly-up, and Nucla hasnt planned for that, he said.

One autumn 16 years ago, Monte Naslund, whose family has worked on the irrigation ditch for decades, was at cow camp, where cattle graze in the summer in the mountains near Nucla. It was always quiet up there, but on that day he noticed something different. The rumble of airplanes overhead, a constant background buzz even on a mountaintop, had stopped. He was listening to a depth of silence he had not heard since he was a boy.

Only much later, when he came down off the mountain, would Naslund learn why it was so silent. Terrorists had flown airplanes into both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and civilian flights had been grounded nationwide. More than 2,000 miles from the stunned New Yorkers who had watched the towers fall, Naslund had been able to hear the nation coming to a halt.

Around Nucla these days, theres a sense that many of the residents are listening intensely that the seismic shift they are experiencing, as urban and rural priorities clash across the world, is audible to them.

Some in town are optimistic that they will find a way forward: expand the Nucla airport for commercial flights, turn the old elementary school building into a hemp manufacturing center, finally mobilize tourism to Nuclas canyons, rivers and bike trails.

Others are doubtful that hemp will make much difference, and question whether Nuclas natural landscape beautiful, but without the show-stopping monuments of Moab or Zion could ever become a true tourist destination. The town lies off the highway; it is not on the way to anywhere. Miller, who runs an Airbnb in her house, said the guests she gets stay for just one night, stopping over on their way somewhere else.

Thompson, who is also the president of the local historical society, is doing what she can to celebrate the towns more positive history. There is a Uravan reunion picnic every year to bring together old residents of the town. In 2012, the event had attracted an estimated 1,000 people. They served yellow cake in tribute to yellowcake (milled uranium oxide). In the fall, shes planning to host an all-terrain-vehicle tour of the entire length of the socialist ditch.

But progress on building a larger museum is slow and after years of effort, Thompson said that Nucla and Naturita still feel like an afterthought to the broader world, their culture and history less of a priority. We really are a lower class people. I dont know how to say that in a nice way, she said.

For Cooper, the Telluride commissioner, Nucla was founded with a pioneering spirit, and its residents still have it.

If they could tap into that and take advantage of it, she said, I think the skys the limit.

This article was co-published with Topic, a new storytelling studio. Sign up for our newsletter here

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Under siege by liberals: the town where everyone owns a gun - The Guardian

An iconic paragon of Dad Fashion, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick is inspiring complaints from the Left for sporting a supposedly controversial t-shirt while on vacation in Nantucket this week.

A play on the popular "Life is good" brand, the shirt reads "Life is great" and shows a soldier and his military dog chasing down an armed man in a turban.

The shirts have a special significance, as Tom Shattuck of the Boston Herald described:

The shirts are sold on a site called http://www.tridentk9.org, run by Jim Amann, now a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles. Amann is a former Navy SEAL who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with his military dog Rocky. Amman's company, Trident K9 LLC, provides police and military K9 equipment and training, as well as the light-hearted shirt Belichick was sporting yesterday. As Amann describes it, the shirt "tells a cartoon story of a deployment in Afghanistan where SEAL operators are chasing bad guys." The website suggests wearing the shirt to "celebrate the end of Osama Bin Laden."

So let's cut off the whining just as swiftly as Belichick might cut off a pair of sleeves.

In an article titled "Bill Belichick's Off-Season Look Is Basically Breitbart in Margaritaville," Esquire writer Luke O'Neil called the shirt "political" and asked, "Watching a dog maul a brown-skinned, presumably Muslim man, is supposed to be ... delightful?" Vice writer Sean Newell implied the shirt was "offensive."

"It reminds me of that video of a police dog mauling a Black man," media personality Tariq Nasheed tweeted.

But life is, in fact, "great" when our country's brave military ends the lives of terrorists, particularly the one depicted on this t-shirt. More people should take a page out of Belichick's playbook and celebrate the men and women who serve this country by putting their lives on the line every day to fight our enemies.

Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

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Liberals freak out over Bill Belichick wearing a pro-military shirt - Washington Examiner

(Corrects typo in name Xiaobo in first paragraph)

* Even hospital visitors seem unaware of Liu

* Official media in Chinese don't mention him

* China activism repressed since Xi took power

* Micro-bloggers evade censorship with Liu posts

By Christian Shepherd

SHENYANG, China, July 13 (Reuters) - As the hospital treating Liu Xiaobo says his organs and breathing have begun to fail from cancer, few in China outside a small circle of dissidents know about the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and his lifetime pursuit of liberal democratic reform.

Even other patients at the First Hospital of China Medical University in the northeastern city of Shenyang, where Liu is being treated, seem not to know they are sharing the facilities with a world famous dissident.

When Reuters visited the floor where friends say Liu is being treated, visitors for other patients on the same ward seemed confused and asked why there were new procedures when security questioned them and checked their IDs.

Nothing has appeared in Chinese-language official media since Liu was diagnosed with cancer in late May. Searches for "Liu Xiaobo" on Chinese social media show no results.

China's foreign ministry answers questions from international media at its daily briefing with the standard line: China is a country ruled by law and the case is an internal affair; other countries should not meddle. Even that line is missing from the official transcripts of the briefings on the ministry's website.

The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid published by the official paper of the ruling Communist Party, is the only publication that regularly writes articles about Liu, in English, and usually to rebuff international criticism.

The paper has cast Liu as an outsider marginalized from society whose cause has failed inside China.

It was overseas dissidents" who are the most active in "hyping the issue and are trying to boost their image by deifying Liu, the Global Times said in a Monday editorial. Western mainstream society is much less enthusiastic than before in interfering with China's sovereign affairs, it said.

Liu was the co-author of a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, which attracted more than 10,000 signatures online before the authorities deleted the document from internet pages and chatrooms. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, a year after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion.

Charter '08, issued in 2008, reflected an apparent shift in China at the time towards becoming more open to liberal ideals, said Beijing-based historian and political commentator Zhang Lifan. That changed when Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

"Since (Liu) was sentenced, peaceful transformation as a route for change has essentially been blocked off by the party. Since the new administration came into office, the party is moving in the opposite direction," he said.

Hu Jia, a well-known Beijing-based dissident and friend of Liu's, says few people in China know anything about him or his work.

"The reality is that if you are on the streets of Beijing and you stop a hundred people, to have one know who Liu Xiaobo is would be a great result," he said.

"Chinese society, due to internet censorship and being cut off from the rest of the world, essentially does not get to hear our (dissident) voices. Protesting voices on Weibo are almost not existent these days," Hu said.

But Xi has helped the dissident movement by locking up a peaceful protester and letting him die in detention. "The last state to do that was Nazi Germany," Hu says.

Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist who died in 1938 in Nazi Germany's Berlin, was the last Nobel Peace Prize winner to live out his dying days under state surveillance.

While China's censorship makes it difficult to assess Liu's support, he is a "hero" for many liberals in China, even if few will speak out for him, a Chinese editor at an online publication said, declining to be named.

"I am really not sure if it's accurate to claim he is unknown to the public, (or if) people are just too scared to show their knowledge (of Liu)," the editor said.

Despite the restrictions, internet posters have written in support of Liu and his cause, using variations on his name to avoid the censors.

"When it comes to freedom, comes to constitutional government, we have talked too much, now we need to act," read one comment on the micro-blogging platform Weibo. "Situations like Liu Xiaobo's are still a worry, but we nevertheless need people to act, bravely face the risk of death and act."

The post echoed something Liu wrote in April 1989 when he returned from studying in the United States to take part in the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square: intellectuals often "just talk", they "do not do".

"He's leaving, but we cannot see, cannot speak, cannot act" said the headline of an article shared as an image on the popular messaging platform, WeChat, a method that can slow down the censors. In the article, three people born in the 1980s were interviewed about Liu.

"I will see him as a very important symbol, (but) people like him fail to get attention from common folk, and given his plight as an unknown prisoner of conscience, there is little to say," one person identified as L said in the article.

Albert Ho, who heads the Hong Kong Alliance organising protests in Liu's support, said China's efforts to erase Liu from people's memory will fail.

"Don't underestimate the power of the internet ... And don't underestimate the people. I have seen many episodes where suddenly the hero gets degraded into the devil and the devil becomes the hero," he said, referring to previous shifts in China's political system.

"People are not living in an open society in China so you never know," he said. (Additional reporting by Venus Wu in HONG KONG and Beijing news room; Editing by Bill Tarrant)

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REFILE- China's liberals quietly fight efforts to erase Liu Xiaobo legacy - Reuters

Its anyones guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, this drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving President Donald Trump and the East, including the eruption of controversy over Trumps remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trumps liberal critics were revealing and dangerous.

The speech a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog, tweeted the Atlantics Peter Beinart. Trumps speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto, read a Vox headline. According the New Republics Jeet Heer, Trumps alt-right speech redefined the West in nativist terms.

Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term alt-right that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.

There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trumps speech: For example, that he shouldnt have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaws recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served Americas interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.

How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of liberalism and the West. Liberalism is an ideology defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty, and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.

So to appeal to the West in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the Wests wars, religions, and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.

What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of the West to liberalisms enemies on the alt-right that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of immigration skeptic, or social conservative, but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the Wests greatest achievements.

As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed todays conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.

As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the West. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist they fashion themselves defenders of the West, but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the Wests principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.

To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trumps speech was his remark that the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism and, presumably, the PC liberals who he believes enabling it. But there is another threat to the Wests survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.

The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the West into a slur, Trumps critics are disarming. Perhaps the presidents dire warning wasnt so exaggerated, after all.

Jason Willick is a staff writer at The American Interest.

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The alt-right is an attack on Western values. Liberals shouldn't surrender so easily. - The Denver Post

Constitutional originalism has long been an unquestioned dogma for conservative evangelicals, as the recent nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court has again confirmed. Evangelical political leaders responded to the announcement with unrestrained praise. As the Southern Baptist Conventions Russell Moore wrote, Judge Neil Gorsuchis a brilliant and articulate defender of Constitutional originalism in the mold of the man he will replace: Justice Antonin Scalia.

Focus on the Familys James Dobson struck a similar note, suggesting that Gorsuch would uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and the original intent of its framers. For many evangelical conservatives, originalism has a dogma-like status not just because it is the proper way to read and interpret a text, but because the competing doctrine of the living Constitution has brought us not only the administrative state in the New Deal, but Roe and Obergefell.

Yet if John Comptons fascinating new book The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution is right, evangelicals at the turn of the twentieth century are largely to blame for evangelicals problems here at the turn of the twenty-first century: It was evangelicals then who made the doctrine of the living Constitution plausible, even if evangelicals today lament it.

Comptons fascinating and masterfully executed argument goes something like this: Evangelical campaigns against alcohol and lotteries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century aimed at not merely regulating such vices, but prohibiting them. But to enact their political vision, they had to break existing traditions of constitutional interpretation. By exerting political pressure upon courts and subordinating constitutional interpretation to their political aims, evangelicals helped create the legal and intellectual conditions in which the doctrine of the living Constitution arose.

Comptons argument for this thesis is intricate, but it demands and deserves unwinding. He posits that the political and moral perfectionism of antebellum Protestants created standards of public morality that threatened the core ideals of the commercial republic that the Constitution was drafted to engender and protect. That is, evangelicals wanted to regulate public morality in ways that impinged upon commercial and business practices that had been legal, if not always favorably smiled upon, since the countrys founding.

While evangelical campaigns against liquor and lotteries eventually aimed at eradication, rather than tolerant regulation, such a goal was at odds with existing doctrines of constitutional interpretation. The attempt to abolish existing lottery grants, for instance, ran aground upon the Contract Clause, while prohibitions on alcohol possession and sales infringed commonly accepted notions of property rights. Not only that, but prohibition at the local level could not be accomplished without overcoming the Commerce Clause. Interstate sales were protected by the federal government, while police powers were reserved to local governmentsa dilemma that left immoral property free to be distributed and sold across state lines.

Compton traces these conflicts through their development in state courts, and then within the Supreme Court, to show that evangelical morality eventually influenced constitutional interpretation. To pick but one small aspect of Comptons many data points, he contends that until the mid-1870s, agreements between legislatures and private entities were contracts within the meaning of the Contract Clause, which would have included lottery grants. However, in the 1880 case Stone v. Mississippi, Chief Justice Morrison Waite invalidated such a contracta lottery grant from Mississippion grounds that the government, as Compton says, possessed the inherent right to suppress immoral activities.

It is, of course, theoretically possible that such a doctrinal shift had pristine intellectual and interpretative causes. However, Compton points out that the decision was made in the midst of a significant public controversy about the Louisiana Lottery, which was at the time probably the most notorious of the lottery companies.

As prohibitions on gambling at the local level had increased, the Louisiana Lottery had survived and expanded through interstate ales. They were so well known that in 1879, Anthony Comstockof the anti-contraception laws famearrested dozens of Louisiana Lottery agents in New York City. The Louisiana legislature subsequently revoked the lotterys 25-year charterbut it was protected in court by a judge who was, Compton says, widely denounced as a shill for lottery interests.

This was the political context in which theStone casewas decided, and which set the stakes for the Supreme Courts ruling. Protecting the lottery grant on the basis of the Commerce Clause would mean the most notoriously corrupt corporation in America would enjoy immunity for the length of its charter. However, revoking the grant would undermine the traditional interpretation of the Commerce Clause, which had protected lottery grants.

Waites opinion in Stone suggests he is not unaware of such political realities. Waite had written that because lotteries were prohibited in many states, the will of the people has been authoritatively expressed on the question. The court could either embrace precedent and oppose the will of the peopleor innovate. They chose the latter course, and created an exception that they tried to quarantine from having broader doctrinal effects.

Yet Stone did not crush the Louisiana Lottery, which survived by exerting its considerable political power to make their charter part of their states constitution, and thus outside the scope of Stones ambit. (Yes, seriously.) The survival of the Louisiana Lottery allowed it to go on flourishing through interstate sales. Much to the frustration of evangelical anti-lottery activists, as long as a single state allowed the lottery to exist, both the states and the federal government lacked the power to curtail interstate sales.

States had no power over interstate commerce, and the federal government was hampered by the distinction between its police and commerce powers. Compton argues that congressional legislation prohibiting transporting lottery tickets was the first clear exercise of federal police power. The Supreme Court upheld the law in Champion v. Ames, in which Justice Harlan argued that lottery tickets were commercial items, even though they had never been regarded as such by the law. But Harlan also emphasized the fact that lotteries had become offensive to the entire people of the Nation. The conflict, in other words, between morality and commerce was decided on moralitys sideand thus another exception was born.

While judges in such opinions attempted to quarantine the effect of their exceptions to their cases, Compton demonstrates that the logic that they relied upon was inexorable. In each area of conflict between the aims of morals legislation and the Supreme Courts doctrines, Compton traces a three-stage pattern of judicial resistanceaccommodation, andultimatelydoctrinal incoherence.

The Supreme Courts response to New Deal legislation has often been credited (or blamed) for undermining economic due process in the service of a hugely popular administrative state, a shift that some have blamed on the idea of the living Constitution. Yet as Compton observes, nearly every argument advanced during the New Deal period began by quoting from Justice Harlans opinion in Champion v. Ames. That is, it was the morals decisions of the late nineteenth century that made the New Deal cases possible.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, who is widely credited with being one of the progenitors of the doctrine of the living Constitution, repeatedly pointed to alcohol and gambling opinions to argue that as long as the regulation was reasonable, the judiciary should defer to the considered judgment of the people. Compton suggests that morals precedents thus brought the abstract arguments of the sociological jurists and the Legal Realists down to earth. That is, they made the notion of a living Constitution credible.

It is tempting to think that the political perfectionism of the late-nineteenth century evangelicals has nothing to do with the political manifestation of evangelicalism today. The campaigns against lotteries and alcohol were, after all, progressive efforts, while the struggles for marriage and religious liberty that have occupied the Religious Rights attention are largely conservative, defensive postures. And even if Comptons thesis is true, it is always open to contemporary evangelicals to disavow their own history, and simply deny that what happened in the past has any meaningful bearing on either the Religious Rights self-understanding or its political rhetoric.

Yet besides being a deeply unconservative posture, such a path would obscure the lessons Comptons book contains for political movements tempted by perfectionist idealsas the Religious Right indisputably is. For one, the political perfectionism at the heart of the anti-lottery and anti-gambling campaigns raises deep and important questions about which vices we should merely regulate and which we should prohibit, and to what lengths we will go to restrain them.

Few of us, on the Right and Left, are willing to countenance the question of which injustices we should permit as a society for the sake of not creating deeper injustices in our efforts to solve them. But in aiming to eradicate one vice, evangelical activists sowed the seeds for accomodating many others.

In aiming to eradicate one vice, evangelical activists sowed the seeds for accomodating many others.

Not only that, but Comptons thesis should prompt contemporary evangelicals to mitigate the denunciations that they direct toward the progressive left for their advancement of the living Constitution doctrine. The idea that the meaning of the Constitution should be determined by the will of the living has generated a great deal of damaging legal nonsense. From Sen.Dianne Feinsteins comments about Roe to Judge Posners recent invention of the judicial right to legislate, the living constitution has wrought a great deal of bad upon our country.

Yet if Comptons thesis is right, it means that such strong denunciations need to be accompanied by a greater deal of self-awareness than they often are, and to be decoupled from the antithesis between us and them that happens when the argument becomes defined by partisan stigma, as this one indisputably has. The doctrine of the living Constitution is bad, but its a badness which more traditions have deployed than we would want to recognize.

Comptons thesis demonstrates that within the many ironies of history, the social and political instruments a perfectionist movement deploys may be easily co-opted for ends and purposes never imagined in their development. That is, if late-twentieth-century evangelical activists sowed the wind, todays activists have reaped the whirlwind. Or, to switch the biblical reference, the constitutional sins of evangelicalisms forefathers have long been visited upon their more conservative heirs.

The value of such an account is that it requires a more complicated assessment about who is to blame for various features of our culture war. Describing the progressive Left as the aggressors in the culture war has the dual effect of preserving the Religious Rights purity and establishing its victim status. Yet Compton makes it clear that on at least one of our deepest culture war frontstheories of constitutional interpretationmatters are far more complicated than that simplistic narrative allows. The idea that the progressive Left invented the doctrine of the living Constitution ex nihilo in the 1920s plays well, but only at the expense of letting our own history and tradition off the hook.

But then, that kind of self-exonerating narrative is precisely what a culture war requires, if it is going to be fought with the energy that it (allegedly) needs. Acknowledging the complicity of ones own tradition in bringing about the social and political conditions one is decrying must inevitably chasten a movements rhetoricbut such reflective self-awareness rarely generates the kind of enthusiasm and fervor that keeps the institutional coffers full.

It is easierfar easierto simply disavow the past and pretend that evangelical politics began in 1980 with the Advent of St. Ronald of Reagan. There is nothing particularly conservative about such a strategy, inasmuch as it seeks to ignore both the debts and benefits that a movements forbearers bestowed. But there lies the ironical rub; in seeking to escape the past and define the evangelical political witness only by the living, todays Religious Right adopts the very mentality that demonstrates their continuity with their late-nineteenth-century forbearers.

Matthew Lee Anderson is pursuing a D.Phil. in Christian ethics from Oxford University, where he is also an associate fellow of the McDonald Centre for Christian Ethics. His academic work is focused articulating the grounds for procreative and parental rights, and countering anti-natalist arguments. He founded Mere Orthodoxy, and is the author of two lay-level books and numerous essays. He is a Perpetual Member of Biola Universitys Torrey Honors Institute, and lives in Waco, Texas, with his wife.

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How Evangelicals Invented Liberals' Favorite Legal Doctrine - The Federalist