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It’s worth noting that the original version of the Green New Deal was devised by the left-leaning British National Economic Foundation, as a means for recovery after the 2008 economic collapse

Once Labour’s full, staggeringly bold proposals were unveiled, support for the party soared

Labour climbed a full 20 points in the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, robbing the Tories of a majority in the Parliament

So it seems to me there is a massive opportunity for the left now across the Western world. Look at how popular a 70 percent top rate is … in America! The left is correct to sense a huge opportunity and they are right, I think, to be bold.

I wrote about Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour last year in these pages, and that, under his leadership, “it turned out to be difficult to propel a new movement of left radicalism without simultaneously tapping into a vein of left extremism,” and that seems to me to be precisely the challenge in the U.S. as well

the full package from the contemporary radicalized left in both the U.K. and U.S. brings with it far more troubling ideas

If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists.

A passion for social justice curdles into attacks on free speech

Postmodern critical gender theory denies any meaningful natural differences between men and women, and casts an entire sex as inherently problematic

Concern about mass immigration is dismissed as nothing but racism and xenophobia.

so Labour, after so much promise and success, has not been able to get any sustainable polling lead over the most shambolic Tory government in memory.

If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win

If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much

If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.

Hostility to the policies of the state of Israel — a perfectly legitimate position — morphs swiftly into ugly anti-Semitic tropes

It’s not easy to find any heroes in Washington these days, so allow me to eulogize one. Walter Jones was a longtime Republican congressman from North Carolina, who died earlier this wee

Are they really capable of fucking this up once again? The answer that is emerging in the first months of the new Democratic House is: of course they can.

If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders

I’m haunted all the time by the knowledge of what my lifetime will have witnessed. Humans are committing countless species to death; we are destroying the life of our oceans and skies; we are changing the planet’s ecosystem more quickly than at any time since the asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs. From the perspective of life itself, we are conducting a holocaust of the natural world. How is the knowledge of this not traumatizing?

A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research notes, according to the BBC, that “since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.”

Last week, research emerged showing that the insect biomass is declining by 2.5 percent a year, which means that we may wipe out the entire insect population within a century — and lose a quarter of it in the next ten years.

This amounts to what Jill Kieldash describes as the “actual structural and functional collapse of the natural systems which have supported life on Earth for the last 400 million years.”

I don’t know how this paradigm affects you every day, but it is for me the gutting context for everything, a growing nausea laced with guilt and shame.

In a century, we will have destroyed this Earth as we have known it — in absolutely full awareness of what we are doing. It’s the greatest crime humanity has ever committed

One answer could be that they are behaving in a classic way when a catastrophe strikes: They’re traumatized by this knowledge, and they cope with this trauma by a classic form of disassociation. In fact, we are all living through this collective trauma

Once we become aware of its true scope, depth, and accelerating pace, we then begin to view everything else through the traumatic lens of the climate crisis

How could anyone with a reasonably realistic, educated worldview not be haunted by the perpetual specter of Climate Trauma when considering fundamental life and identity choices?

I am not surprised by declining birth rates in the West. Having a child in today’s era means initiating another human being into the end of the world as we have known it

I find my own witnessing of the collapse of liberal democratic values in the West inseparable from the mass extinction of life on Earth our civilization has wrought — and the double depression this creates makes me want to escape

this collective trauma is never-ending. It’s a 9/11 all the time. Woodbury notes the similarity between our knowledge of future planetary collapse and a diagnosis of a terminal disease: “You may put it out of your mind for spells, but the grief associated with prospective loss comes at you in waves.

The challenge is to resist disassociation — which is “the human capacity to mentally escape an insufferable reality.

We are disassociating from America in our current dystopian politics. But we are also, more profoundly, disassociating ourselves from our deepest ecological reality: that we are killing what created us. And we cannot seem to stop.

we may be underestimating what the constant drumbeat of news about the accelerating sixth great extinction has been doing to us psychologically.

when it became clear that the Iraq War had been based on phony intelligence, he actually changed his mind. More than that: He took moral responsibility for his vote for the war, and rethought a great deal of his previous views. Ashamed of what he had done — and the lives lost because of the war — he went on to write 12,000 letters to family members of service members killed

he tirelessly fought to bring back war-making powers to the Senate, where they belong. He took on his own party leadership in demanding votes before military adventures

He was that very rare creature: a true Republican fiscal conservative

Of course a man of this character was a dogged defender of his own constituents, especially those in the military subjected to unfairness or injustice of any kin

This didn’t make him a liberal. It made him a conservative. And he proved that to be a conservative these days — a humane, decent, honest, principled conservative — you really have no place in the Republican Party

I spoke mainly to Leavers, since they were the disrupters. I heard many true stories and many strong opinions, but as the years went by I began to attend more and more to the hints of dreaming between the lines, in what was not said as well as what was said. I noticed three things.

One was a strong sense of oppression, of being censored, and an attendant resentment. There were several occasions when Leavers I spoke to left pregnant gaps that could only have been filled with anti-immigrant sentiments that they weren’t “allowed” to say.

for many, casual racism is regarded as a lost patrimony; that as much as Leavers might oppose immigration, they are no less resentful of the “elites” rendering it awkward to categorize people along racial lines

I used to be skeptical of the idea that Britain hadn’t come to terms with the loss of its empire.

for the freedom to roam the North Sea without engaging with other littoral countries

Australian universities instead.

The third thing was the preoccupation with the state as defender of its people.

that it was the British government’s job to defend native Britons against immigrants; foreign competition; greedy capitalists; and, through the National Health Service, illness.

Another thing I noticed was the internationalism of Leavers — internationalism with a particular flavor: the nostalgia for Ian Smith’s Rhodesi

not a single one of the many Leavers I’ve had hours of conversations with over the years has explicitly expressed wanting it back. How could you? It would be ridiculous.

I believe now that a subliminal empire does persist in the dreaming of a large number of Britons, hinted at in a longing for the return of guilt-free racial categorization, in the idea that my country can be both globally open and privileged in an international trading system where it can somehow turn the rules to its advantage, in the idea of a safe white core protected from the dark hordes beyond by a mighty armed force

the matchless political skills of Margaret Thatcher. She achieved the extraordinary feat of turning into political orthodoxy a plainly contradictory credo, that nationalism and borderless capitalism could easily coexist.

The reality of the new Britain has been a shrunken welfare state, a country ruthlessly exposed to global free-market competition. The blindness of Thatcherism’s supporters has been to accept it as the patriotic solution to the globalism it enabled.

The bizarre and already disproved notion that the global free market might work as an avatar of Britain’s imperial power lies at the heart of the die-hard Brexit psyche. Propagating it was Mrs. Thatcher’s personal success, and that success, as we can now see, was her great failure.

Trump proved in the 2016 election that immigration unified the GOP much more effectively than did its traditional focus on reducing entitlement spending, free trade and low deficits. Among the GOP base, the populist issues of trade and immigration are now far more animating than even abortion or taxes.

I never understood why a movement would take pride in rejecting modernism (rather than shaping it, conserving what is good and discarding what is not), but on top of that, stopping a huge demographic shift — the largest, most diverse generation in history (millennials) supplanting aging baby boomers — seems futile and irrational.

The retreat into ethno-nationalism is no small matter but rather goes to the very definition of America and the core questions the Civil War, the civil rights movement and every wave of anti-immigration sentiment have presented: Who is an American? Does America need immigrants to prosper and to renew its creed in each generation?

Trump and this iteration of the Republican party have made aversion to diversity such a vital principle, it cannot be considered trivial. This is how Republicans have chosen to define themselves these days — and why many of us can no longer call themselves Republicans.

he current turmoil over immigration conflates several separate issues. One is DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has provided temporary work permits and reprieves from deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. These are the so-called Dreamers, who number about 800,000.

A third issue is the future of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants who have come to the United States over decades and have effectively integrated into American life. The Trump administration has ordered a broad immigration crackdown against them.

Donald Trump is by no means America’s first racist president. But he ran a campaign explicitly rooted in bigotry, exclusion and white resentment. To his die-hard but ever-shrinking base, comments like those he made Thursday only reaffirm his solidarity with the cause. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, certainly saw it this way. “This is encouraging and refreshing, as it indicates Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,” the site wrote in a post.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.

So black America and conservatism have converged in interesting ways — but in the most important way they are inevitably divided, for the obvious reason that Donald Trump’s ascent began with a racist conspiracy theory and then added other white-identitarian appeals.

it is a conservative error, naïve or culpably ignorant, to act disappointed that black Americans aren’t attracted to a coalition led by a barely-repentant “birther” who flirts with white supremacists.

For decades, the essential failure of conservative outreach to African-Americans has been the insistence that the right just want to treat black Americans as individuals — a fine-sounding idea, except that white America has never found a way to treat its former slaves that way, making black identity politics not an indulgence but a matter of survival.

his appeals to solidarity have often been racially exclusive in exactly the ways an African-American skeptic of conservatism would have predicted.

Is there an alternative? Realistically, maybe not: In the shadow of Trump, the pan-ethnic conservatism the country (and, for its long-term survival, the G.O.P.) needs may be a fantasy.

First, conservatives who resist the idea that today’s racism can be legislated away need to think harder about how to honor the particularities of the African-American experience.

Second, conservatives who want black Americans to give their policies a new hearing should repudiate policies that on the margins tend to disenfranchise black voters.

If you’re telling African-Americans that their current political leadership is failing them, don’t package that message with the exaggerations about “urban” voter fraud that too many Republicans have propagated. If you want people to consider joining your coalition, act like you want to compete for their vote, not just discourage them from voting.These two suggestions are a beginning, not an end, and the right is obviously better off listening to actual black people than extremely white columnists like me.But a red-pilled rapper is a bad place to start that listening tour — at least if conservatives want a real bridge, not just a Kanye dream palace, linking worlds that are strangely close in certain ways but also as far apart as ever.17CommentsThe Times needs your voice. We welcome your on-topic commentary, criticism and expertise.

In Tennessee and Alabama, in Arkansas and Oklahoma and Mississippi, Democrats, black and white, told me they were united by a single, urgent goal: defeating Mr. Trump this November, with any candidate, and at any cost.

Faced with the prospect of their children losing the basic rights they won over many generations, these voters, as the old Chicago political saw goes, don’t want nobody that nobody sent.

Together, they are determined to hold on to a country that was paid for 55 years ago in blood. In the South, as in the rest of America, that may be a hard thing to do.

Mr. Clyburn, 79, talking about the first time he was arrested protesting for civil rights decades ago. “When I sat in jail that day, I wondered whether we were doing the right thing, but I was never fearful for the future,” he said. “As I stand before you today I am fearful of the future of this country. I’m fearful for my daughters and their futures, and their children, and their children’s futures.”

Such amorality was warranted, many explained, because if Clinton had won, America would be “over.”

Anton went further. “If we must have Caesar,” he said, “who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

that spirit not only endures, it has intensified. Trump’s conservative critics, or “apostates” as Conrad Black calls us, face the same ultimatum. “The choice, for sane conservatives,” Black writes, “is Trump or national disaster.”

The upshot of them all is that the test for “sane” (or real or good or true) conservatives is loyalty to the president, not to any coherent body of ideas or ideals. Even truth takes a back seat.

Mr. Jorjani imagined a near future in which, thanks to liberal complacency over the migration crisis, Europe re-embraces fascism: “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

“Our original vision was the alt-right would become like a policy group for the Trump administration,” he explained, and the administration figure “who was the interface was Steve Bannon.”

Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.

The alt-light promotes a slightly softer set of messages. Its figures — such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich — generally frame their work as part of an effort to defend “the West” or “Western culture” against supposed left-liberal dominance, rather than making explicitly racist appeals.

Many of them, in fact, have renounced explicit racism and anti-Semitism, though they will creep up to the line of explicitly racist speech, especially when Islam and immigration are concerned.

they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.

The extreme alt-right are benefiting immensely from the energy being produced by a more moderate — but still far-right — faction known as the “alt-light.”

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs.

The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists.

The alt-light’s dedicated fan base runs into the millions. Mr. Watson has more than a million YouTube followers, for example, while Mr. Yiannopoulos has more than 2.3 million on Facebook. If even a tiny fraction of this base is drafted toward more extreme far-right politics, that would represent a significant influx into hate groups.

According to researchers, the key to hooking new recruits into any movement, and to getting them increasingly involved over time, is to simply give them activities to participate in. This often precedes any deep ideological commitment on the recruits’ part and, especially early on, is more about offering them a sense of meaning and community than anything else.

Intentionally or not, the far right has deftly applied these insights to the online world. Viewed through the filters of alt-light outlets like Breitbart and Prison Planet, or through Twitter feeds like Mr. Watson’s, the world is a horror show of crimes by migrants, leftist censorship and attacks on common sense. And the best, easiest way to fight back is through social media.

The newly initiated are offered many opportunities to participate directly.

These efforts — a click, a retweet, a YouTube comment — come to feel like important parts of an epochal struggle. The far right, once hemmed in by its own parochialism, has manufactured a worldwide online battlefield anyone with internet access can step into.

maybe, along the way, one of your new online Twitter buddies will say to you, “Milo’s O.K., but have you checked out this guy Greg Johnson?” Or maybe they’ll invite you to a closed online forum where ideas about how to protect Europe from Muslim migrants are discussed a bit more, well, frankly

“I’m just fighting less and less opposition to our sorts of ideas when they’re spoken,” Mr. Johnson, the Counter-Currents editor, told Mr. Hermansson. His optimism, unfortunately, appears to be well founded.

The last time the religious left made this much noise was in protesting the Vietnam War, when the members of the clergy were mostly white men.

Now, those in the forefront include blacks and Latinos, women and gays, along with a new wave of activist Catholics inspired by Pope Francis. And they include large contingents of Jews, Muslims and also Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists in some cities — a reflection of the country’s religious diversity.

Relations between Democrats and religious progressives have been more difficult since 1980, when evangelicals deserted Jimmy Carter — one of their own, whom they had supported in 1976 — for Ronald Reagan.

Last year, he branched out. Along with the Rev. Traci Blackmon, a well-known supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and other clergy members, Dr. Barber trained thousands of activists in 32 states, an effort that continues.

“If we’re going to change the country,” he says, “we’ve got to nationalize state movements. It’s not from D.C. down. It’s from the states up.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

50th anniversary of the landmark sermon at Riverside Church in Manhattan in which King denounced the Vietnam War, saying, “I cannot be silent,”

Dr. Barber preached against Mr. Trump from the same pulpit and denounced what he saw as pervasive racism across the political right.

Such a loose alliance of people of many faiths, many causes — and no small number of intractable disagreements — may never rival the religious right in its cohesion, passion or political influence

Issues on which the religious left is at odds with Democratic doctrine include military spending and the death penalty, though the most polarizing is abortion — the main barrier, for many liberal evangelicals and Catholics, to voting as Democrats — as could be seen when the party split recently over whether to endorse an anti-abortion Democrat running for mayor of Omaha.

Setting abortion aside, political appeals based on religious beliefs continue to carry risk for Democrats, given the growing numbers of Americans who claim no religion:

Secular voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and younger voters are far more secular than older voters.

“Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left,” he said. “The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.”

If Dr. Barber works from the outside in, Mr. Wallis is the consummate inside player. His Capitol Hill operation is on an upswing, its big new offices bustling with interns plotting social media campaigns like a “Matthew 25 Pledge,” to “protect and defend vulnerable people in the name of Jesus.”

“People are trying to figure out: How do we get traction? But it has not yet jelled,” she said. “So I yell at the Holy Spirit, ‘Hurry up!’”

In Cincinnati alone, 21 churches have joined a sanctuary coalition, forming teams to respond when immigrants are detained, as one group of ministers did recently when a Guatemalan man seeking asylum was held at a nearby jail. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

More and more, younger evangelicals are questioning their association with the religious right, Mr. Nathan said: “I don’t know almost any evangelical Christians who feel comfortable with the old evangelical guard. They’re certainly not in my orbit. Millennial Christians are really concerned about social justice.”

“I wish we were not in this place,” he said, “but it’s one of the gifts of this moment. The energy is there, and there’s new, deep relationships that are being forged between clergy and congregations that never existed before.”

A system like our ideal liberal democracy, which does not place any constraints on critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions; and does not allow any suppression of ideas no matter how dangerous to the system or objectionable to its citizens; and does not permit itself to select who can come in, or stay, based on their acceptance/rejection of fundamental liberal democratic values, has both: (1) guaranteed perpetual generation of conditions of normative threat, and all the activation, polarization, and conflict that that produces, and (2) disallowed all means for protecting itself against that “authoritarian dynamic,” which otherwise might have included allowing: some selectivity in regard to the fundamental values of those who are allowed to come, and to stay; constraints on certain kinds of critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions;

constraints on free speech that exclude racist or intolerant speech; some ability to write moral strictures into public policy to reflect traditional beliefs where the majority “draws the line.” If a liberal democracy were to allow those things, it would no longer be a liberal democracy. But if it does not allow those things, it is extremely difficult to protect itself from fundamental threats to its continued existence

“Both sides of this increasingly polarized divide see the other as trying to extirpate their way of life — and not inaccurately,” Schnurer wrote in “War on the Blue States” in U.S. News and World Report earlier this month:

Blue America spent the last eight years dictating both economic and cultural changes invalidating virtually every aspect of Red America. Liberals see all that as both righteous and benevolent — we’re both promoting better values and willing to help train them to be more like us.

The prototypical Trump voter sees a changing America leaving him behind; part of this is economic, part of it demographic, part cultural. I think liberals tend to see this as a thin cover for racism, a reflection of troglodyte viewpoints, and in any event unwarranted as the world these folks are resisting would be better even for them if only they’d let it, by giving up their benighted religious views, accepting job training in the new technologies, and preferably moving to one or the other coasts or at least the closest major city.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, observes that “believers in liberal democracy have unilaterally disarmed in the defense of the institution” by agreeing in many cases with the premise of the Trump campaign: “that the country is a hopeless swamp.” This left Democrats “defenseless when he proposed to drain it.”

This is a classic political problem of general benefit at the cost of specific individual harm. At a minimum, “we” — as a country but also as a self-styled progressive subset of that country — have given inadequate thought to those harms and how to ameliorate them; but I think you can also make the argument that we have exacerbated them.

Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”

The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to.

I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes

Where, Pinker asks,are the liberals who are willing to say that liberal democracy has worked? That environmental regulations have slashed air pollutants while allowing Americans to drive more miles and burn more fuel? That social transfers have reduced poverty rates fivefold? That globalization has allowed Americans to afford more food, clothing, TVs, cars, and air-conditioners? That international organizations have prevented nuclear war, and reduced the rate of death in warfare by 90 percent? That environmental treaties are healing the hole in the ozone layer?

Pinker continues:Over the longer run, I think the forces of modernity prevail — affluence, education, mobility, communication, and generational replacement. Trumpism, like Brexit and European populism, are old men’s movements: support drops off sharply with age.

The problem is that even if Pinker is right, his analysis does not preclude a sustained period in which the anti-democratic right dominates American politics. There is no telling how long it will be before the movement Trump has mobilized will have run its course. Nor can we anticipate — if and when Trumpism does implode — how extensive the damage will be that Pinker’s “forces of modernity” will have to repair.

The Supreme Court is scheduled this week to discuss adding a case to the next term's docket that could expand the scope of the Second Amendment if the court declares New York state's stringent concealed carry law a violation of an individual's right to possess a firearm.

America's broken political system prevents even basic, common-sense gun control legislation from ever seeing the light of day.

Race plays a central role in America's twisted history of gun control. When Black folk, from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers, tried to apply their Second Amendment right to bear arms in the service of defending Black lives against racial terror they were violently repudiated.

The Republican Party, beginning with Richard Nixon's 1968 "law and order" campaign and continuing through Sen. Ron Johnson's comments about Black Lives Matter in relation to the January 6 insurrection, has successfully vilified large parts of the Black community as criminal. At times this was done with an assist from Democrats, including then-Sen. Joe Biden's coauthorship of the 1994 Crime Bill, who co-signed treating many Black Americans as gun-toting "thugs."

In this sense, America's crisis of mass shootings -- ongoing before the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing amid its ravages -- is not only bound up in the operations of our political institutions but also more emotionally connected to how some White Americans understand their relationship to our national identity.

Organized racial terrorist groups, beginning in the late 19th century, reached new peaks of national respectability in the early 20th century as the reformulated Klan (rebirthed in Stone Mountain, Georgia) marched 30,000 strong at the US Capitol on August 8, 1925.

White supremacist violence infects our criminal justice system as much as it does our political institutions. Dylann Roof, the young White racist who murdered nine Black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, was treated with respect, even kindness, by law enforcement, who stopped by a fast-food restaurant to get him something to eat after he committed mass murder.

Perhaps what is most striking in the case of the apprehension of violent White mass shooters is that law enforcement routinely manages to arrest them unharmed. This stands out in stark contrast to oftentimes innocent Black suspects who end up dead at the hands of the police.

The deadly assault on the US Capitol cast a spotlight on how predominantly White law enforcement understood, responded to and at times sympathized with White rioters who brandished Confederate flags and anti-Semitic propaganda in the Capitol building rotunda.

We will see a sign of true equity in criminal justice when we can see Black and White shooting suspects safely apprehended at identical rates. But limiting the easy access to guns and ending racist police violence will not eradicate White rage.

The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.

But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.

That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.

To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.

The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.

Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”

What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination

There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”

As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”

When your priority is to preserve a particular mythology — the United States as a land of equal opportunity — the push to take a critical view of the United States’ racial history becomes a threat.

It might result in a real rethinking of the order of things, which might result in culpability, which might result in recognition that recompense is needed. (Hm, recompense — sounds like “reparations,” a subject America remains unwilling to touch with a 10-foot pole.)

Suggesting you’d rather not change the racial status quo is seen, justifiably, as immoral.

But disguising one’s discomfort with racial reconsideration as an intellectual critique is still allowed.

Thus has emerged the conservative obsession with critical race theory (CRT), a mode of pushback that has taken on a life and logic of its own.

t is a psychological defense, not a rational one. And it has become so prominent because the status quo is comfortable, and accountability is not.

Calls for racial accountability can feel like an attack when you aren’t ready to acknowledge how your behavior, or that of your ancestors, has harmed others.

It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.

It has a clear definition, one its critics have chosen not to rationally engage with.

Instead, these critics have expanded the concept to stand in for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history, from the New York Times’s 1619 Project to K-12 curriculums that dare to state (accurately) that the Founding Fathers enslaved people

Critical race theory has been purposely mischaracterized as a divisive form of discourse that pits people of color against White people, that reduces children to their race.

these are straw man arguments, the use of which highlights the discomfort underlying critics’ obsession with CRT in the first place: their fear of criticism itself, and an anxiety about what actually addressing racial inequality might look like.

Progressives have tried to push back against the anti-CRT wave by attempting to more clearly explain the concep

their time would be better spent seeking ways to address the response underlying conservative resistance — worries about culpability, recrimination and displacement.

Objections to CRT are an emotional defense against unwanted change, not an intellectual disagreement. Conservatives were never debating the facts.

How can you love a place while knowing the crimes that helped produce it? By relentlessly confronting hypocrisy and remaining “woke” to the transformational power of American ideals.

For Douglass, however, this founding crime did not discredit American ideals; it demonstrated the need for their urgent and radical application. He insisted that the Constitution was “a glorious liberty document.”

“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States. … The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie.”

I grew up in St. Louis, in a placid, White, middle-class suburb. At school, I was inflicted with classes in Missouri history that emphasized the role of the region in the exploration and settlement of the American West. I visited the Museum of Westward Expansion in the base of the Gateway Arch, which glorified the sacrifices of American pioneers.

“The Broken Heart of America” is a strong antidote to such lessons. In this telling, St. Louis was “the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness” and “the morning star of U.S. imperialism.

It was the home of vicious lynch mobs and racial redlining. “Beneath all the change,” Johnson argues, “an insistent racial capitalist cleansing — forced migrations and racial removal, reservations and segregated neighborhoods, genocidal wars, police violence and mass incarceration — is evident in the history of the city at the heart of American history.”

And so on. My first reaction, honestly, was to bristle. Was every character in the American story a villain? Must one accept Marxist economic and social analysis to believe in social justice?

It is my second thought, however, that has lingered. Historians such as Johnson might dwell on historical horrors and put them into narrow ideological narratives, but the events they recount are real.

And it’s true that white-supremacist ideology pervaded institutions and systems — labor policies, construction contracts, city planning, racist policing, the exclusion of Black children from public pools.

Atlanta Deputy Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. said Wednesday the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, frequented the two Atlanta spas and bought the gun used in the shooting the day of the incident.

President Joe Biden ordered flags to be flown at half-staff Thursday to honor the victims. Biden also plans to visit Atlanta on Friday to meet with Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, as well as Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders, according to Georgia State Rep. Bee Nguyen.

Among the issues they will bring up is the concern that the shootings be "taken seriously" and seriously considered as a hate crime against Asians and not dismissed as the suspect having a "bad day,"

Across the US, Asian Americans are riddled with fear as unprovoked attacks against them intensify. Anti-Asian hate crimes have more than doubled during the pandemic,

The violence has surged amid racist rhetoric during the coronavirus pandemic -- some popularized by ex-President Donald Trump. Many Asian Americans have been subjected to vitriol about the "China virus" or the "kung flu" -- even those who have never been to Asia.

whenever anyone disagrees with her opinion or policies, the first thing they do is criticize the country her parents came from and, second, her gender.

Three of the victims were 52, 75 and 64 years of age, according to birth years listed in an Atlanta police incident report.

Bottoms told CNN that nowadays "there seems to be permission now to be hateful."

"There seems to be a permission that I've not seen, at least in my lifetime," Bottoms said. "It does predate Donald Trump, but he certainly has given permission and done his part to elevate the hatred."

Kim, a 24-year-old Korean American, said she often feels like she has a target on her back. Last year, she said a parent wanted to remove one of her students from her second-grade class because Kim was Asian.

Yet despite outrage over the shootings, attacks against Asian Americans continue. An Asian man and woman were assaulted Wednesday by the same suspect in separate attacks,

"While we're relieved the suspect was quickly apprehended, we're certainly not at peace as this attack still points to an escalating threat many in the Asian American community feel today,"

Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, of Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta; Xiaojie Tan, 49, of Kennesaw; and Daoyou Feng, 44, were all fatally shot at Youngs Asian Massage in Cherokee County.

Actress Lucy Liu told CNN's Erin Burnett on Thursday that she believes race relations will get worse before they can get better.

Three more victims were found dead at Gold Massage Spa in Atlanta, and another victim was found dead across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa.

Long, 21, faces eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.Long was on his way to Florida, possibly to take the lives of more victims, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said, citing investigators.

The suspect told police he believed he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as "a temptation ... that he wanted to eliminate,"

It's not clear whether any of the three businesses offered sexual services in addition to massages. But authorities have given no indication the three businesses were operating illegally

Capt. Jay Baker on Tuesday said Long "was pretty much fed up and had been kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."

Sheriff Frank Reynolds said in a statement Thursday he has known and worked with Baker for many years and his comments "were not intended disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect."

Shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday, deputies were called to Youngs Asian Massage between the Georgia cities of Woodstock and Acworth after reports of a shooting, Cherokee County sheriff's officials said.That shooting left four people -- two Asian and two White -- dead and one person injured, Baker said.

About an hour later and 30 miles away, Atlanta police responded to the Gold Massage Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta. Police said they found three people dead.While there, police received another call of shots fired across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa, where they found one person dead

Investigators found surveillance video of a suspect near the Cherokee County scene and published images on social media.Long's family saw the images, contacted authorities and helped identify him, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Wednesday."(The family members) are very distraught, and they were very helpful in this apprehension," Reynolds said.

Long has claimed responsibility for the shootings at the spas, the Cherokee County sheriff's office said.

He is facing four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder,

A law enforcement source told CNN that Long was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours watching pornography online.

"It looked like a hate crime to me," she said. "This was targeted at Asian spas. Six of the women who were killed were Asian so it's difficult to see it as anything but that."

"Sex" is a hate crime category under Georgia's new law. If Long was targeting women out of hatred for them or scapegoating them for his own problems, it could potentially be a hate crime.

The shootings don't have to be racially motivated to constitute a hate crime in Georgia.

"We hear your concerns and want it to be known that these victims will receive the very best efforts of this office," Wallace said. "We anticipate beginning to meet with the impacted families in the near future, and earn their trust, as we continue to develop our case against the defendant."