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HELOTES, TexasLast spring, having just retired from Congress, Will Hurd was feeling adrift. He had agreed to write a book, telling his remarkable life story and diagnosing a malfunctioning political system, all while teasing out a run for the presidency in 2024, but Hurd struggled with an underlying anxiety. For the first time in his adult life, the guy whod climbed so quicklyfrom college class president to star CIA operative to lone Black Republican in the Housedidnt know his next move. Finally, Hurd sat down with his nearly 90-year-old father and shared his concerns.

William, I cant give any advice on what you should do, because I dont understand any of these things, Bob Hurd told his youngest son. But I know what you shouldnt do. Dont be desperate. Because when youre desperate, you make bad decisions.

The former congressman tells me this story on the back patio of El Chaparral restaurant, one of his favorite haunts, in suburban San Antonio. Were drinking Ranch Watertequila and lime juice over ice, with a splash of mineral seltzerand comparing notes on his book, American Reboot, which splices together riveting tales that help illuminate his views of a Republican Party thats rotting from the top down. But the book doesnt contain the story about this father-son talk. Rather, the anecdote surfaces organically when I ask Hurd about his brutal indictment of the GOP and how that has changed his relationships with the likes of Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, party leaders whom he once considered close personal friends.

Some of my friends, some of my former colleagues, they are desperate, Hurd tells me. They are so desperate to hold on to their positions, to hold on to their power, that they make really bad decisions.

Read: Will Hurd picks a side

Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the partys enabling of Donald Trumps assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the partys ugliest impulses. (The third chapter of Hurds book, written as an open letter to the Republican Party, is titled Dont Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe.)

The desperationlawmakers catering to the loudest voices in the party baseis not healthy, Hurd says. Its the by-product of safely partisan districts that provide more incentive to light fires than put them out. Its the consequence of the publics collapsing faith in the core institutions of civic society, which invites national politicians to weaponize disputes that should be addressed at the local level. Its the expression of a country in declinea country convinced that its existential concerns are not Chinese sabotage and Russian disinformation, but face masks in public and vaccines for a virus.

Were in a competition. If we dont win it, were going to be a former superpower, Hurd says. We need to treat it as a competitionus versus the world. But we cant, because our politics are so messed up. Were too busy fighting with ourselves.

Hurds book is notable for many reasonshis personal and professional journeys are legitimately compellingbut most of all for its rebuke of Americas proportionality problem. Drawing on his diverse experiences, from chasing down intelligence overseas to parsing classified documents in Congress to working with groundbreaking tech companies today, Hurd argues that we are woefully unprepared for what is coming our way. Quantum computing has the potential to break every form of encryption that guards our money and our secrets. Artificial intelligence could cut the service-based workforce in halfevery two years. Biomedical advances will force questions about the ethics of rewiring our brains and halting the degradation of human cells. In the meantime, China will continue its siege of the American economyswiping our intellectual property, snatching up our real estate, sabotaging our investmentswhile Russia will intensify its decades-old campaign to delegitimize our systems of government and turn Americans against one another.

His subtext is plain enough. To confront these challenges, Hurds colleagues in the Republican Party might need to rethink their fixation on transgender athletes and critical race theory.

Everyone treats everything these days like its some damn emergency. And its got to stop, Hurd says. Were going to be dealing with issues that are so complicated, and so life-altering, that they make the stuff were dealing with right now look like tickle fights.

Hurd proposes a wholesale reorientation of our politicsaway from the dopamine-inducing cultural conflicts of the day, and toward the generational trials that will shape American life in the 21st century. To pull it off, he says, well need both a groundswell of reasonable people reclaiming the political discourse from absolutists and ideologues, and innovative, unifying leadership at the highest levels of government.

Hurd knows that these two conditions are codependent: A leader cant emerge without a movement, and a movement manifests only with the inspiration of a leader. He also knows that some people view him as uniquely qualified to meet this moment: a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation.

What Hurd doesnt know is whether America is ready to buy what hes selling. The nation has been lulled into long-term complacency by elected officials and special interests and media personalities that have short-term motivations. The most engaged voters in his partythe people likeliest to cast ballots in a presidential primaryare, to varying degrees, addicted to the fear and grievances being peddled by people clinging to relevance. Hurd realizes that breaking this addiction wont be easy. In fact, it might prove impossible.

He does, however, see another path forwardone that depends less on persuading those hardened partisans and more on mobilizing a different kind of voter. The overwhelming majority of conservative people in this country, Hurd says, are not watching Fox News every night or imbibing conspiracy theories online. They are not politically neurotic. In fact, they may have never voted in a primary to choose a nominee for presidentand thats the point. They have been busy trying to put food on their table, put a roof over their head, take care of the people they love, he says. But now theyre getting fed up. They are tired of everybody. They are ready for something different.

Like what?

Something normal, Hurd says.

Every politician has an origin story. But Ive never listened to one as tellingand infuriatingas Will Hurds.

In 2008, the young CIA operative was stationed in Afghanistan. He had been an unlikely recruit to the agency; having majored in computer science at Texas A&M, Hurd once dreamed of making a fortune in the tech world. But serendipitous encounters with CIA veterans on the A&M faculty had transformed his curiosities, and several years into the War on Terror, Hurd had emerged as a vital asset in the Middle East. After a bombing near the CIA compound, Hurd was tasked with briefing a group of lawmakers from the House Intelligence Committee, who happened to be visiting Afghanistan. When he began to explain the nature of the local rivalries between Sunni and Shia factions in the region, one of the congressmen interrupted. He asked Hurd what the difference was between a Sunni and a Shia.

Read: Will Hurd could be the canary in the coal mine

Hurd thought it was a joke. He waited for the punch line. But it never came. The congressmans expression made it apparent that he, as well as others in the room, did not understand the basic distinctions at the heart of this war zone. Here were federal lawmakersmembers of the intelligence committeewho could not be bothered to understand the place where they were sending trillions of dollars to fund wars in which young Americans would fight and die.

The episode confirmed Hurds worst suspicions about American politicians: that they were lazy, ignorant, and selfish. (Some of the members of Congress he spoke to that day, he writes in his book, grumbled that the briefing was keeping them from shopping for local rugs.) Hurd was so enraged that he decided to quit the CIA, move home, and run for Congress.

The workhorse reputation Hurd earned on Capitol Hill is best viewed through this prism: the endless weekend drives through the loneliest corners of his district, the obsession with basic constituent services, the determination to gain expertise on every issue before him, the reflex to ignore partisan squabbling and pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. It also explains Hurds impatience with far-right and far-left partisans who hail from safe districts where no meaningful work is required to win reelection every two yearsand who, in between social-media feuds and cable-news speeches, disparage people like him as languid moderates.

The moderates are the ones who behave the same way regardless of whether their party is in power or not. The moderates are critical to crafting and passing legislation that actually gets signed into law. The moderates are the ones who work the hardest, Hurd writes in his book. And we are the ones who get shit done. Extremists do the most bitching and get the least accomplished.

Its true that Hurd has never been driven by any particular ideology. He hired a number of Democrats for key positions in both his D.C. and local officesa practice thats virtually unheard of on Capitol Hilland, when in search of legislative partners, defaulted to looking across the aisle before recruiting fellow Republicans. Once, while we were driving together across a barren stretch of West Texas, I spent an hour pressing Hurd to explain why he considered himself a Republican. He rambled a bit, recalling that his first-ever vote was for Bob Dole (but only because of Doles military service). He talked about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. Then he pivoted to standard fare about too much government impeding human progress. Finally, he shrugged. Look, my hypothesis is that 80 percent of Americans are around the center40 percent left of center, 40 percent right of center, Hurd told me. And theyre all persuadable. The letter next to my name should matter less than my message.

Hurds bookand to an extent, his prospective presidential candidacyshould not be read as an attempt to erase the differences between the two parties. Rather, it is a rejection of their fringes, and of the false choices that frame much of our political debate. Even when it comes to subjects as fraught as abortion or Second Amendment rights or the definitions of human sexuality, Hurd argues that there are broad areas of agreement obscured by the incessant demagoguing of partisans who stand to benefit from sowing narratives of zero-sum division.

Take the issue of immigration. The nadir of Hurds time in Congress came in early 2019, when the federal government shut down for a record-setting 35 days because of a stalemate over which policies to fundand how much money should be spentat the southern border. For 35 days, Hurd watched the leaders of both parties scheming, wrangling their rank-and-file members, figuring out how to emerge victorious from the standoff. Never once in those 35 days did anyone, in either partys leadership, solicit an opinion from Hurda national-security expert, the member who represented more of the U.S.-Mexico border than anyone else in Congress, a guy whos studied the issue inside and out.

Why wouldnt they want Hurds input? Simple. Because they knew he wasnt going to tell them what they wanted to hear. They knew Hurd would offer a set of solutionsthe mass streamlining of legal immigration for both high-skilled workers and low-skilled laborers; the construction of a cutting-edge virtual wall utilizing cameras and fiber-optic cables to monitor illegal crossings; the granting of citizenship to millions of Dreamers; the surge of funding to local agencies dealing with a mass influx of asylum seekersthat would antagonize the loudest voices in both party bases.

So, nothing gets done, Hurd says. Because politicians would rather use it as a bludgeon against each other, as opposed to solving a problem that most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, agree on the solutions to.

The beating heart of Hurds book is a call to Americans to consider the most contentious issues of our times more holistically. Hes not under any illusion that consensus will magically appear. But he does believe that most voterswhat he describes as the 80 percent clustered within range of the middleare tired of being presented with binary choices when it comes to big, complicated questions.

In one passage, Hurd describes his anguish over the murder of George Floyd. It was made that much worse by the reductive scrutiny of his own actions in the volatile aftermath: As the lone Black Republican in the House of Representatives, Hurd felt as though anything he said or didsuch as marching with protesters in Houston, over the objections of his staffwas perceived as picking a side. In his view, there were no sides.

I wanted to show solidarity with Black America. I wanted to explain it was okay to be simultaneously outraged by a Black man being murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement puts themselves in harms way to enable our First Amendment rights, and pissed off that criminals are treading on American values by looting and killing police officers, Hurd writes.

These emotions, he concludes, arent mutually exclusive.

None of this means Hurd wants to be a great reconciler of the two parties. Just because he can envision leading a post-partisan movement, does not mean he expectsor hopes forsome cease-fire between Republicans and Democrats. He believes that competition between two healthy parties is essential to a functioning democracy. He just doesnt believe we have two healthy parties.

Hurd makes no secret in the book of his scorn for the ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Its crusade against oil and natural-gas production, he says, endangers hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs and would make the U.S. dependent on some of the worlds worst actors to supply our energy. Its stigmatization of law enforcementcalls to defund the police, or abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or slash the budget of the U.S. Border Patrolinvites an era of lawlessness and violence and death, particularly along the southern border. These two issues alone, Hurd says, explain why Latino voters are rapidly disaffiliating with the party.

Read: The Texas Republican asking his party to just stop

When I was in Congress, I was the only Republican on the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Now theres the potential that three of the five [Texas] border seats are going to vote Republican. The border district in Arizona is probably going to flip too. Why? Hurd tells me. Because you have Democratic mayors and sheriffs and county judges that are sick and tired of national Democrats talking down to them. For those Latino communities, border security is a public-safety issue. Oh, and by the way, most of those folks on the border know somebody who works in the energy sector. So they feel like Democrats arent just putting them in danger; Democrats are trying to dismantle their way of life.

That said, Hurd saves his harshest commentary for his own party.

Republicans have become comfortable saying or doing anything to win an election, Hurd writes. The party of family values champions cruel policies and hateful politicians while lecturing the left on morality. The party of fiscal discipline and personal responsibility blows holes in the budget, then blames Democrats for their recklessness. The party of empowerment and opportunity systematically attempts to disenfranchise voters who are poor and nonwhite. The party of freedom and liberty keeps flirting with authoritarianism.

Hurds most pressing concern for his party is that its become an agent of disinformation. This is not a uniquely Republican phenomenon, he emphasizesthe book contains a blistering critique of Democrat Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for leaking faulty information regarding Trump colluding with Russiabut its the Republican Partys embrace of lies and propaganda that most immediately threatens our system of government. Hurd says that watching the January 6 assault on the Capitol, just three days after his retirement from Congress, felt like he was watching a sequel to 9/11extremism infiltrating America in a new form.

It was an example of the kinds of internal threats many of our military leaders have cautioned our political leaders to take as seriously as external threats, Hurd writes. To prevent future manifestations of this threat from materializing, the Republican Party must drive out those who continue to push misinformation, disinformation, and subscribe to crackpot theories like QAnon.

But thats not happening. Just as Hurd was shipping his book to the printer, the Republican National Committee met in Salt Lake City. Its 168 membersthree from each of the 50 states and six territories, elected at the local level by party activistsadopted a resolution censuring the two House Republicans working on the January 6 investigation. The resolution also called the insurrection legitimate political discourse.

Hurd was dumbfounded. He believed that Trump deserved to be impeachednot just for inciting the violence at the Capitol but also for his recorded phone call with the Georgia secretary of state, in which the president asked a top election official to falsify ballots. (Hurd says these circumstances differ from Trumps first impeachment, which he agonized over and ultimately voted against, because there was a clear violation of the law in the run-up to January 6.) Letting Trump off the hook, Hurd says, was bad enough. For the Republican National Committee to gather more than a year after the insurrection and pass a resolution justifying the death and destruction at the U.S. Capitol was a new level of crazyand, to him, proof that the party needs an intervention.

The irony, I tell him, is that these are the peoplethe best-connected local Republican leaderswho will play an outsize role in determining whether an intervention is successful. These are the people who do the most influencing and organizing and favor-trading in their state parties. These are the first hands hell have to shake in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina if he decides to run for president.

Hurd stares at me blankly. Finally, he arches an eyebrow. Why?

Because, I explain to him, these are the gatekeepers to the presidential process. Even Trump, who ran the most unconventional campaign in modern history, had to kiss some rings and grease some palms.

Hurd is still blank-faced. Thats how things have always been done in the past, he says. But why does it have to be that way?

I ask Hurd what he would propose instead.

Look, theres some people Im not going to appeal tothe right-wingers. Thats okay. But theres more of the other people. The normal people. And Im going to find them, he says. It will be hard. The cost per acquisition of those voters is higher than it is for the traditional Republican primary voteryou know, the people who have voted in the last four primaries. Thats why most people dont bother trying to find them or turn them out.

Wouldnt it be easier, I ask, to just concentrate on wooing those existing likely voters?

Maybe, he says. But if you want to change the party, you need to change the primary electorate. This isnt rocket science. If you want to get back to normal, you need to get more normal people to vote in primaries.

Its a provocative notion. Hurd isnt just hinting at a campaign against Trumpism; hes suggesting an assault on the structural realities of the Republican Party.

Contemplating this sort of insurgency is one thing when the GOP is locked out of power. But come November, Republicans are likelybased on all the available evidenceto rout Democrats in the midterm elections. If that happens, the loudest and most radical elements of the Republican Party will be emboldened, and any incentive to moderate the partys identity will seem lost.

Hurd acknowledges this. But if past is prologue, he says, Republicans will do little with their newly won power in 2023. Congressional leaders will struggle to corral their rambunctious majorities; the party will succeed in frustrating Joe Bidens agenda but fail to provide any governing vision for the country; and by 2024 the country will be forced to choose between two dug-in, do-nothing parties.

At that point, Hurd says, Maybe people will feel like its time to get off this crazy train.

Its possible, Hurd tells me, that such continuing dysfunction will push voters deeper and deeper into their partisan silos. His hope rests on a belief that theyve been pushed too farand that sooner or later, theyll push back.

Look, if youre a left-wing nut or a right-wing nut, youre probably not going to smell what Im cooking, he says. But most people arent nuts. They want to solve problems. They want to make this century an American century. They are normal people who want normal leaders.

Hurd is putting the pieces in place. His friends say he wants to run for president in 2024. He may not have universal name recognition or a behemoth political operation, but he does have a vision. He has a loyal and growing donor base. He has the biography and the charisma and the God-given political chops to put the Republican Partyand the rest of the countryon notice.

People close to Hurd thought he was crazy to abandon a future corner office at the CIA to run for Congress. (Bob Gates, the former defense secretary and CIA director, lobbied furiously to keep Hurd from leaving the agency; then, pitying his former Texas A&M pupil, Gates did something hed never done in his life: He wrote a campaign check.) The young candidate said the same thing to every donor and party official he met: You dont need to think I can win; you just need to think its not crazy. Thats the same approach the 44-year-old bachelor envisions taking in a campaign for national office.

Hurd is the definition of a boom-or-bust candidate. He could go all the way to the White House; he could also go nowhere fast. Everything we know about politics in the Trump era suggests that the second outcome is far likelier than the first. But Hurd says hes not worried about that. Because the only thing worse than being defeated is being desperate.

Here is the original post:
Will Hurd 2024: Revenge of the Normal Republicans? - The Atlantic

Racism is not just a way of describing a person's actions. It is a core part of their behavior, reasoning and values, and how they understand themselves in relationship to other human beings and the world. This is true of both racist individuals and racist societies.

Racists and those others invested in white supremacy and white privilege in its various forms will almost always reveal themselves. This is true regardless of their race or ethnicity.

Last week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson offered many such moments. Presuming Jackson is confirmed, as appears likely, she will be the first Black woman (and third Black person) to be a Supreme Court justice in American history. There is no doubt Jackson is eminentlyqualified. She has had to excel, as both a Black person and a woman, in ways more than equal to her white and male colleagues in order to forge a successful legal career.

Racists, white supremacists and other racial authoritarians possess great appreciation for the power of spectacle and timing. Senate Republicans and their supporters in the larger white right would not let Jackson's historic moment go by without attempting to twist it to their own purposes.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee (and their boosters in right-wing media) pounced on Jackson with a series of insidious lies and allegations drawn from the QAnon conspiracy theory. According to this narrative, she is a pedophile-protecting, criminal-coddling "anti-white" Black supremacist who embraces "critical race theory" and seeks to destroy the "traditional family."

RELATED:Ted Cruz turns Jackson's Supreme Court hearing into Brett Kavanaugh rehab

As Abby Zimet wrote for Common Dreams, Jackson's hearings"turned into a noxious maelstrom of frat boy 'whiteness at work' thanks to the relentless, hectoring assaults by a 'marauding band of racist, sexist visigoths' of the GOP, who managed to turn a more-than-eminently qualified Black female judge into a child-porn-loving, critical-race-spewing danger to the Republic." She continues:

Sadly, the most striking feature of almost four days of hearings was not the historical moment a nation poised to add the first Black woman to its highest court but the bullying, badgering, appalling histrionics of a motley collection of ignorant old white guys (and one young one) subjecting a Black woman to the kind of contemptuous "jackassery" that no white counterpart, even a sniveling, lying, bellicose, sexual assaulting bro, would ever suffer, like, say, being asked the definition of a woman or if babies are racist WTF all while still smiling.

At the Nation,Elie Mystal offered further context:

Toni Morrison says "the very serious function of racism is distraction," but Jackson knew it wasn't worth being distracted by [Ted] Cruz, or any of the small-minded and condescending white people arrayed against her on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She's worked too hard and bested too many of the white man's little traps to get tripped up near the finish line by senators who debase themselves and their offices for 30 seconds of attention on Tucker Carlson's show. Jackson passed her test.

But it was hard to watch her be put through the crucible of white approval. The attacks used by Republicans against her weren't about her qualifications: Everybody knows she's more than qualified to be on the Supreme Court, and even most of the Republicans said so. The attacks weren't about her personal behavior or ethics: Again, even Republicans remarked that she had lived a good life and there's been no whiff of scandal, and no suggestion of sexual assault (which is not something you can say for all Supreme Court nominees).

Instead, Republicans simply pronounced her guilty by association with people and stereotypes of people they don't think belong in America.

As Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC shared on Twitter, "Critical Race Theory is the new N-word. Republicans are wielding it like a burning cross in order to persecute Black people."

At Insider, Marguerite Ward observed that Jackson "wasconstantly interruptedandinterrogated," and that unlike Brett Kavanaugh,"who pounded his fists and yelled during his hearing, Jackson remained poised":

Can you imagine being interrupted and repeatedly asked about a theory that you have not studied but that people assume you support because you are Black? Can you imagine being painted as a radical, though the theory, which repeatedly you say you don't support, centers on the notion that racism is very real?

Ward also notes that while Justice Amy Coney Barrett was sharply questioned by Democrats during her own confirmation hearings,"she was not treated with the disrespect Jackson was."

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called out Judiciary Committee Democrats, with one notable exception, for enabling these attacks through their cowardice. Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., failed to enforce the committee's rules, "allowing members to constantly badger Jackson." Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., lodged a strong objection to Republican members' conduct, but did so off camera and outside the hearing room. "Not until Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the only African American on the committee, spoke did Republicans get their deserved pushback."

RELATED:Republicans turn Jackson's confirmation hearings into a QAnon circus

Perhaps even more important, Rubin highlighted how the mainstream media was also culpable in enabling the racist attacks on Jackson, by failing "to convey the visual image of angry White men screaming and interrupting a Black woman, who dares not show anger for fear of being labeled unprofessional or lacking the correct temperament":

Combined with the insinuations about her "softness" on child pornography and thehysterics on critical race theory, the aggression barely masked the Republican outpouring of White grievance.

It behooves Republicans who do not approve of this travesty to speak up. Meanwhile, Democrats should use their majority position to put an end to such conduct (cut off Republicans' microphones or conclude the hearing until they act appropriately), and the media should not provide camouflage for it. The refusal to afford a historic nominee with respect she deserves and to denounce baseless accusations speaks volumes about our collective failure, still, to reckon with the original sin of racism.

For all of the undeserved attacks on her character, intelligence, personhood and qualifications, Jackson remained an indomitable example of Black excellence, Black dignity and Black humanity. Ironically, her poise and skill in the face of such outrageous disrespect demonstrated, in part, why so many white people of a certain political orientation and others invested in white privilege and the status quo remain terrified of Black Americans' success in the face of enormous obstacles.

Jackson's professional and personal success is a trigger for the deep anxieties and fears that many white people, especially white men, feel about their own shortcomings and inadequacies being revealed in a society that has elevated them in large part through unearned advantages. White privilege is paradoxical in that way: It is taken for granted as just being "normal," but its beneficiaries are fearful of losing something they simultaneously refuse to admit is real.

Entirely too many political observers and pundits (the majority of which are white) insisted that Jackson's hearing would have "no drama" and that Republicans would likely "behave themselves," since they cannot realistically block Jackson's confirmation and she will not change the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. Thosevoices were wrong, as they have been so many other things in the Age of Trump and beyond. White privilege and white racial innocence act as blinders to reality, a truth that goes well beyond those with overtly racist attitudes and runs deep in the media and political classes.

Ultimately, too many (white) members of the news media and the political elite are unable or unwilling to accept a self-evident fact: Today's Republican Party and conservative movement are fundamentally white supremacist, and their leaders cannot abandon those beliefs and that ideology because racial hatred, bigotry and white identity politics pay great political dividends, along with other material and psychological rewards.

RELATED:GOP's violent rhetoric keeps getting worse and nobody is paying attention

Even by the low standard established by the other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who attacked Jackson, Sen. Ted Cruz's behavior stood out as especially execrable. Two moments were especially noteworthy. At one point during last Wednesday's proceedings, Cruz posed this "question" to Jackson:

But let me ask, under the modern leftist sensibilities, if I decide right now that I'm a woman, and apparently I'm a woman. Does that mean that I would have Article III standing to challenge a gender-based restriction?... OK, if I can change my gender, if I can be a woman and an hour later if I decide that I'm not a woman anymore, I guess I would lose Article III standing. Tell me, does that same principle apply to other protected characteristics? For example, I'm an Hispanic man. Could I decide I was an Asian man? Would I have the ability to be an Asian man and challenge Harvard's discrimination because I made that decision? I'm asking you how you would assess standing if I came in and said if I have decided I identify as an Asian man.

Cruz is of course engaging in fear-mongering and outright distortion about gender identity, LGBTQ rights and race. His attack on Jackson also illustrates the complexities of white supremacy and the color line in post-civil rights America, where many nonwhite people are also invested in white supremacy and anti-Black attitudes and behavior.

Cruz's attacks on Jackson are a way for him to earn his "whiteness," and in doing so bolster his popularity among Republican voters. Race has always been a social construct that changes over time; whiteness and what groups are deemed to be "white" are malleable categories. Cruz identified himself as "anHispanic man" in his "questioning" of Jackson, but Hispanics and Latinos are a highly diverse ethnic and cultural group, not a "race" per se. Some members of that group are Black and brown, while others identify as "white". Some Hispanics and Latinos are not (yet) defined as "white" in America's system of racial categorization but yearn for whiteness and its privileges.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In addition, "colorism" and anti-Black racism are relatively common within or between Hispanic and Latino communities and play a prominent role in such calculations and behaviors. It's important to recognize thatwhite supremacy is an ideology and belief system. Skin color is not a requirement for doing the work of white supremacy. Justice Clarence Thomas, to cite the most obvious example, is unquestionably a Black man who for many years has supportedwhite supremacy through his rulings, legal philosophy and other behavior. In fact, he is one of America's most dangerous white supremacist leaders.

Last month, well before Jackson's confirmation hearings, Ted Cruz made his white supremacist views clear duringan appearance on Fox News, claiming that "Democrats today believe in racial discrimination, they're committed to it as a political proposition." He was objecting to President Biden's commitment to nominate the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court:

What the president said is that only African-American women are eligible for this slot ... that 94% of Americans are ineligible. I think our country has such a troubled history on race, we ought to move past discriminating based on race. The way Biden ought to do it is to say I'm going to look for the best justice, interview a lot of people. And if he happened to nominate a justice who was an African-American woman, great. But you know what? If Fox News put a posting, we're looking for a new host for "Fox News Sunday" and we will only hire an African-American woman or a Hispanic man or a Native American woman, that would be illegal. Nobody else can do what Joe Biden did.

There is obvious partisan and racial hypocrisy at work here: Presidents have wide latitude to determine which individuals they will consider for the Supreme Court or other prominent appointments. Most notably, Ronald Reagan promised to nominate the first female Supreme Court justice, and even Donald Trump vowed to appoint a woman after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death. There was no outcry from Republicans about those decisions being "discriminatory."

For most of the country's history, full and equal citizenship in American society was not possible for Black people. Indeed, it was literally illegal: Black people were considered first and foremost human property, and even the possibility of their freedom and equality were viewed as antithetical to white freedom and white democracy.

RELATED:How white supremacy fuels the Republican love affair with Vladimir Putin

The long arc of improving American democracy has in large part also been the story of Black Americans and their struggle to be acknowledged as full human beings and equal citizens under the law. That has made the Black Freedom Struggle in America a template for other marginalized and oppressed peoples around the world.

Ted Cruz is a highly intelligent man, a graduate of Harvard Law School. He certainly understood the context and history of his attack on Jackson in suggesting that her place in history and her seat on the Supreme Court were "illegal."

Ketanji Brown Jackson did not allow Cruz and the other Republican attackers to make her into some type of white racist and sexist caricature. She is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. But make no mistake: The empire always strikes back, and the Republican fascists and their followers will continue to do everything possible to destroy her, even once she is seated on the court.

Jackson will succeed and triumph nonetheless. Not because Jackson she is a "strong Black woman" with all of the painful and often dehumanizing burdens and obligations that stereotype entails but simply because she is a talented legal scholar, a genuine public servant and a communicator of great poise, grace and wit, who unlike several of her future colleagues has been preparing for this moment for decades and has earned the honor and responsibility of being a Supreme Court justice.

Read more from the original source:
Ted Cruz earns his "whiteness": The Republican attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson - Salon

Kahan and his collaborators went on: Increasing hierarchical and individualistic worldviews induce greater risk-skepticism in white males than in either white women or male or female nonwhites.

In other words, those who rank high in communitarian and egalitarian values, including liberal white men, are high in risk aversion. Among those at the opposite end of the scale low in communitarianism and egalitarianism but high in individualism and in support for hierarchy conservative white men are markedly more willing to tolerate risk than other constituencies.

In the case of guns and gun control, the authors write:

Persons of hierarchical and individualistic orientations should be expected to worry more about being rendered defenseless because of the association of guns with hierarchical social roles (hunter, protector, father) and with hierarchical and individualistic virtues (courage, honor, chivalry, self-reliance, prowess). Relatively egalitarian and communitarian respondents should worry more about gun violence because of the association of guns with patriarchy and racism and with distrust of and indifference to the well-being of strangers.

A paper published in 2000, Gender, race, and perceived risk: the white male effect, by Melissa Finucane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, Slovic, Mertz, James Flynn of Decision Research and Theresa A. Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, tested responses to 25 hazards and found that white males risk perception ratings were consistently much lower than those of white women, minority-group women and minority-group men.

The white male effect, they continued seemed to be caused by about 30 percent of the white male sample who were better educated, had higher household incomes, and were politically more conservative. They also held very different attitudes, characterized by trust in institutions and authorities and by anti-egalitarianism in other words, they tended to be Republicans.

While opinions on egalitarianism and communitarianism help explain why a minority of white men are Democrats, the motivation of white women who support Republicans is less clear. Cassese and Tiffany D. Barnes, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, address this question in their 2018 paper Reconciling Sexism and Womens Support for Republican Candidates: A Look at Gender, Class, and Whiteness in the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Races.

Cassese and Barnes found that in the 2016 election, social class and education played a stronger role in the voting decisions of women than of men:

Among Trump voters, women were much more likely to be in the lower income category compared to men, a difference of 13 points in the full sample and 14 points for white respondents only. By contrast, the proportion of male, upper-income Trump supporters is greater than the proportion of female, upper-income Trump supporters by about 9 percentage points in the full sample and among white voters only. These findings challenge a dominant narrative surrounding the election rather than attracting downwardly-mobile white men, Trumps campaign disproportionately attracted and mobilized economically marginal white women.

Cassese and Barnes pose the question Why were a majority of white women willing to tolerate Trumps sexism? To answer, the authors examined polling responses to three questions: Do women demanding equality seek special favors? Do women complaining about discrimination cause more problems than they solve? and How much discrimination do women face in the United States? Cassese and Barnes describe the first two questions as measures of hostile sexism, which they define as negative views toward individuals who violate traditional gender roles.

They found that hostile sexism and denial of discrimination against women are strong predictors of white womens vote choice in 2016, but these factors were not predictive of voting for Romney in 2012. Put another way, white women who display hostile sexist attitudes and who perceive low levels of gender discrimination in society are more likely to support Trump.

See more here:
Opinion | What We Know About the Women Who Vote for Republicans and the Men Who Do Not - The New York Times

Fellow Republicans are not rushing to embrace Mr. Scotts plan.

I think its good that elected officials put out what theyre for, and so I support his effort to do it, said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among the most endangered Republicans up for re-election in November. Thats what hes for.

But for Republican candidates, the issue is getting awkward. In Arizona, Jim Lamon, a Republican seeking to challenge the Democratic incumbent, Senator Mark Kelly, first called the plan pretty good stuff only to have his campaign retreat from that embrace.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said of the plan, Its good that people offer ideas. His Democratic challenger, Representative Val B. Demings, nevertheless ran an ad on social media accusing him of embracing it.

At a Republican Senate debate in Ohio on Monday, the current front-runner, Mike Gibbons, called the plan a great first draft in trying to set some things we all believe in, adding, The people that dont believe them probably shouldnt be Republicans.

J.D. Vance, a candidate aligned with Mr. Trumps working-class appeal, fired back: Why would we increase taxes on the middle class, especially when Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook pay a lower tax rate than any middle-class American in this room or in this country? Its ridiculous.

Even as he denied his plan would do that, Mr. Scott on Thursday was bold in the criticism of his fellow Republicans, who are relying on him to help them win elections this fall. Timidity is the kind of old thinking that got us exactly where we are today, where we dont control the House, the White House or the Senate, he said, adding: Its time to have a plan. Its time to execute on a plan.

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Income Taxes for All? Rick Scott Has a Plan, and Thats a Problem. - The New York Times

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

QAnons infiltration of the Republican Party has proceeded with frightening steadiness over the last couple years, its growing foothold marked by the arrival of conspiratorial politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to Business Insider, Ron Watkins, widely believed to be one of the authors of the Q posts that started the movement, is one of nearly 60 Q sympathizers running for Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. QAnons adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracists buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured.

This week brought us evidence that QAnon thought has spread further than we knew: into the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the very highest levels of the Republican Party. It is increasingly difficult to separate the movements demented beliefs from the ideology of the already democracy-averse GOP, its traces evident in legislation, media appearances, and leaked private communications.

The latest exemplar of the GOPs descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C. Ginnis right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and thenWhite House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomass commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History, went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong.

The texts also revealed that she has traveled far down the QAnon rabbit hole. She made reference to watermarked ballots that signaled a secret Trump-led military sting operation. She described a plot hatched by the Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators who were already being arrested and shipped to floating barges off the coast of Guantanamo Bay. She wrote messages supporting Sidney Powell, a lawyer whose deranged media appearances made her such a liability that she was forced out of Trumps circle. But Thomas strongly supported Powell, a QAnon favorite. Dont let her and your assets be marginalized instead help her be the lead and the face, she wrote to Meadows on November 13.

Thomass willingness to embrace even the most wild-eyed, Big Liefueled theories only affirms what we already know about some of her political peers, including those who served in the Trump White House. Some went along out of self-preservation or an instinct for power, but other Trumpists, including perhaps Trump himself, actually accepted the proliferating lies about hacked voting machines, a communist influence project, corrupt state officials, and whatever else could be added to the witchs brew of baseless speculation. Whether they believed these lies or not, the effect was functionally the same. In the months before and after Joe Bidens election as president, the government was run byerratic coup plotters, some of whom thought that corrupt Democratic officials were being tried for treason secretly in Gitmo. The sheer absurdity of all this would be hilarious if it didnt involve people in positions of real influence.

These include lawmakers and aspiring presidential candidates in the Senate. Earlier this month, Missouri senator Josh Hawley presented a long Twitter thread charging that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook a blaring Klaxon for QAnon adherents obsessed with child endangerment. He later repeated his criticisms on the first day of Jacksons confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court, prompting a White House spokesman to assert that Hawley was engaging in a QAnon-signaling smear. Hawleys remarks were later echoed by South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who, in addition to chiding Jackson for representing detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, told Jackson, Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited. To cap it off, one of the Republican witnesses for the hearing was Alessandra Serano, an executive at Operation Underground Railroad, a well-funded anti-sex-trafficking organization whose vigilantism and weak relationship with reality resemble that of QAnon adherents.

The signs of the Republican slide toward full epistemic crack-up are all around us. One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the why do you want to hurt children?type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers grooming children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child-exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric.

This phenomenons origins go back decades, with important mile markers appearing under the George W. Bush administration, which gave us truthiness and the reality-based community. How else to explain General Mike Flynn, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and, briefly, national security adviser to the president, who now supports QAnon? Flynns full tilt toward Strangelovian madness may be partly because its popular on the speaking circuit, but he has also draped himself in some of the most unhinged and bloodthirsty language of the QAnon prophecy and seemingly delighted in doing so. (He thought Myanmars military coup was a good model for the U.S., for example.) It may be just another right-wingers embrace of the trolls ethos riling the enemy being the great credo of the modern Republican Party but again, the effect is the same: The free-associative, crazed accusations of conspiratorial thinking stand at the core of modern Republican politics.

If you had any lingering pretensions that our political elites know better than the average QAnon-pilled zombie, its past time to let them go. The people in charge of the Republican Party are mostly old and poorly informed operators who believe some of the most asinine theories to emerge from social-media bilge. Granting them some measure of savviness saying that this is red meat for the Republican base, or that it keeps the checks from right-wing billionaires coming in is to offer too much credit. More than that, it risks absolving them through some nod toward political practicalities when, mostly, this is all pretty evil and disturbing.

The added trouble with Ginni Thomas, of course, is not just that shes a well-connected right-wing activist who communicates abject lies to sympathetic presidential officials. Its that her husband, whose own beliefs are more closely held but likely fairly bonkers, has the power to help implement her agenda and protect her from repercussions. Clarence Thomass defenders on the right have been keen to point out that he and his wife are not the same person, and that much is true but can anyone say with any certainty whether this sitting member of the Supreme Court believes Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election?

At the very least, critics have rightly objected to the fact that Thomas has refused to recuse himself from cases related to the January 6 committee. Hes in a position to not only provide legal cover for his wife but also her potential co-conspirators. If Thomas hadnt been quietly tucked away in a hospital with an undisclosed illness, perhaps this glaring conflict of interest could have been dealt with publicly, but for now, Republican officials continue to make excuses to protect one of their own. And the depressing reality is that the rot is deep. Even if Ginni and Clarence Thomas are excised from American political life, their shameless confederates remain.

This post has been updated.

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QAnon's Takeover of the Republican Party Is Virtually Complete - New York Magazine