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“I spent years debating quite strongly with climate sceptics, including people I assume were paid,” he added. “But there can be a real personal cost interacting over a long time with people who are abusing you.”McNeall said it was hard for scientists to work out how to cut through the false information on Twitter. “I just can’t tell if people are seeing disinformation or getting good scientific information about what is happening,” he said. “That’s really worrying.”

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, who has 94,000 Twitter followers, said he had seen a “huge increase” in tweets from climate-denier accounts, often involving conspiracy theories or long-debunked topics. “A larger fraction of the comments are personal and abusive,” he said. “Any mildly popular tweet from a climate scientist is now targeted for a barrage of replies.”

Hawkins has noticed that many denier accounts have paid subscriptions to Twitter and therefore appear higher up in the replies. “It appears to be a coordinated effort [by climate change deniers] to make it appear as though climate denial is more prevalent than it really is,” he said.

Professor Richard Betts, chair of climate impacts at Exeter University and head of climate impacts at the Hadley Centre, said: “Outright hostility has increased in recent weeks. It’s mostly just people saying you’re talking rubbish. They don’t want a conversation.”

A survey of 468 international climate scientists published by campaign group Global Witness last month found that prominent scientists were the most likely to face abuse, with half of those who had published at least 10 papers reporting they had suffered online harassment as a result of their climate work. One in eight female scientists who reported abuse had been threatened with sexual violence.

But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.

Oh, and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists perpetrating this hoax?

Take Trump’s dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.

What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.

In fact, when you review the history of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements of Trumpism were formed.

The truth is that most prominent climate deniers are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of money from fossil-fuel companies.

But after the release of the recent National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.”

climate scientists have faced harassment and threats, up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work

There are three important morals to this story.

First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing and intimidation.

Second, that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party

Third, we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics.

And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.

the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

Once questions are resolved into a choice between right and wrong, then the laws change. It happened with civil rights. It’s happening now with gay rights. It happened with apartheid and, in an earlier era, with abolition. And this is now being resolved into a question of right and wrong.

remember the impact of policy direction on business calculations is forward-looking. When business begins to understand the direction of policy, they have to start adjusting to where the policy is going. When you look at the EPA process, it’s undeniably clear that there will be a price on carbon one way or the other. Then when you look at the movement in other countries and the states and local measures being enacted, the direction is now quite clear and businesses are making plans to adjust to it.

people are connecting the dots. The cumulative amount of energy trapped by manmade global warming pollution each day in the earth’s atmosphere is now equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs going off every 24 hours.

The leading scientists have in the last two years changed the way they discuss that particular connection. It’s true that it used to be common for them to say you can’t blame any single extreme weather event on global warming.

the odds have shifted and those events are becoming more common and extreme. They’ve now changed their description of that connection. The temperature has increased globally and there’s now 4 percent more water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere than 30 years ago. As a result, every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it.

I think the most important part of it is winning the conversation. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them to shut up. We’re winning that conversation.

the political climate is changing. Something like Chris Hayes’s excellent documentary on climate change wouldn’t have made it on TV a few years ago. And as I said, many Republicans who’re still timid on the issue are now openly embarrassed about the extreme deniers. The deniers are being hit politically. They’re being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.

“You end up with this conspiracy theory about big government taking over our lives, taking away our freedoms, subjecting us to stay-at-home orders that we have to liberate ourselves from,”

The Manhattan Institute, which calls itself a free-market thinktank, ran an article from Heather MacDonald in which she wrote: “Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of 0.000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to 0.12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic.”

Alex Epstein, the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress which DeSmog cites as associated with various groups connected to the rightwing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, called the current recession a “mild preview of the Green New Deal”, and said that “our biggest ally in the fight against coronavirus is the fossil fuel industry.”

“The struggle to defend objective truth against people who consciously choose to deny or distort it has become a fight to defend our society, and democracy itself.”

Jonathan Swift, it’s worth noting that he was not an optimist about “truth.”

By the time a lie is refuted, he wrote, “it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'“

“Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe,” he wrote in 1710, “I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth; that truth will at last prevail.

A recent Washington Post tally found that nearly 300 Republicans running for congressional and state offices are election deniers. That means, as a FiveThirtyEight analysis found, 60 percent of Americans will have at least one election denier on their ballot next week.

In a new USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 63 percent of Republicans say they worry “the election results could be manipulated.”

From the New York Times: When asked, six Trump-backed Republican nominees for governor and the Senate in midterm battlegrounds would not commit to accepting this year’s election results.

The big mistake people have made is in assuming this could blow up only in an extensive struggle in 2024 and perhaps involving Donald Trump. What seems entirely unanticipated, yet is extremely predictable, is that smaller skirmishes could break out all over the country this year.

Democrats have got themselves in a situation where the head of their party holds the most popular position on guns and crime—and yet they’re getting crushed on the issue because they’ve let GOP campaign ads, the right wing media ecosystem, and assorted progressive big city prosecutors shape the narrative on the issue rather than doing so themselves.

The planet has multiple morbidities, some of which will make this coronavirus look, by comparison, easy to treat

how will we feed ourselves?

A large body of evidence is beginning to accumulate showing how climate breakdown is likely to affect our food supply

In his forthcoming book, Our Final Warning, Mark Lynas explains what is likely to happen to our food supply with every extra degree of global heating. He finds that extreme danger kicks in somewhere between 3C and 4C above pre-industrial levels.

At this point, a series of interlocking impacts threatens to send food production into a death spiral. Outdoor temperatures become too high for humans to tolerate, making subsistence farming impossible across Africa and South Asia. Livestock die from heat stress. Temperatures start to exceed the lethal thresholds for crop plants across much of the world, and major food producing regions turn into dust bowls.

Simultaneous global harvest failure – something that has never happened in the modern world – becomes highly likely.

Every food-producing sector claims that its own current practices are sustainable and don’t need to change

even if every nation keeps its promises under the Paris agreement, which currently seems unlikely, global heating will amount to between 3C and 4C.

Thanks to our illusion of security, we are doing almost nothing to anticipate this catastrophe, let alone prevent it. This existential issue scarcely seems to impinge on our consciousness

A food deficit could result in billions starving. Hoarding will happen, as it always has, at the global level, as powerful people snatch food from the mouths of the poor.

But this is just one of our impending crises. Antibiotic resistance is, potentially, as deadly as any new disease. One of the causes is the astonishingly profligate way in which these precious medicines are used on many livestock farms

Pharmaceutical companies are failing to invest sufficiently in the search for new drugs. If antibiotics cease to be effective, surgery becomes almost impossible

Childbirth becomes a mortal hazard once more. Chemotherapy can no longer be safely practised. Infectious diseases we have comfortably forgotten become deadly threats. We should discuss this issue as often as we talk about football. But again, it scarcely registers.

Sunk costs within the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, private healthcare and other sectors prevent the rapid transformations we need. Money becomes more important than life.

this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life. This coronavirus reminds us that we belong to the material world.

Heimbach claims that his party has 600 dues-paying members nationwide. They do not call themselves Nazis. Heimbach said the term Nazi is a slur, and that he draws inspiration from many fascist and national socialist regimes, not just Germany’s.

Ryan Lenz, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks American hate groups, sees no justification for his argument. It is fair to label Heimbach a Nazi because he is an avowed national socialist, Holocaust denier and antisemite.

“In this context, Nazi is not a slur. It’s not an attack. It’s an accurate description,” he said.

“Most of these people are malignant contrarians who have a lot of loyalty and trust issues,”

Jonathan Munshaw, who covered Heimbach’s early tactics for the Towson student newspaper, said he only ever verified one Towson student who was part of the White Student Union: Heimbach himself. But students on campus truly believed that the group was much bigger, Munshaw said – and they were terrified.

At a campus town hall meeting, Evans recalled, Heimbach had said: “I am going to bleed this university white.”

“It sent shockwaves through the campus,” Evans said. As a result of Heimbach’s activism, he thought attendance at campus events dropped. People didn’t want to leave their rooms.

Evans countered Heimbach’s views publicly – and, as a result, he was featured on white supremacist websites, one of which dubbed him a “black supremacist”.

Evans said he had received a death threat at his college graduation, and walked across the stage fearing that he would be shot in front of his mother and his girlfriend.

It was the perfect recipe for a television segment: the white supremacist, the black students arguing against him. “It was an easy story,”

In interviews and speeches to other neo-Nazis, Heimbach is less circumspect, quoting Goebbels and speaking fondly of Mussolini.

Heimbach serves as a lynchpin between the scattered groups of the radical right – the one who can build connections with “the working-class skinhead movement and the upper-class academic racists”, said Lenz, who has been interviewing Heimbach periodically since he graduated from college.

His argument, Lenz said, is: we’re all compatriots in nationalism, and therefore we should stand together, whether we believe in the Holocaust or not.

Heimbach had only been a white nationalist in college. But supporters of his White Student Union responded by sending him books in the mail that helped shift his views about the Holocaust. “At the end of the day,” he said, “you end up at national socialism.”

Lenz said he does not know how Heimbach, who says he is forced to work low-paying jobs, can afford to travel constantly across the country and fly to Europe every year to meet with far-right groups. He said Heimbach had denied having a wealthy patron who funded the trips. Heimbach said he paid for the trips himself, with some contribution from his party

By the month before Trump’s election, Heimbach had shifted gears and developed a new message discipline “capable of spinning answers to questions like someone who had spent years in a spin room”

Trump was Heimbach’s dream come true. In early 2016, Heimbach had described the presidential candidate as the “gateway drug” to outright white nationalism.

“I don’t think I ever even heard him say the word white,” she said. Instead, it was: “‘People are coming in, close the border, and they’re taking our jobs and our communities’ – it was very dog whistle-y.

When the protester’s group finally raised their banners toward the end of Trump’s speech, Heimbach’s group immediately rushed them, not just to tear down their anti-Trump banner but also to punch them, several protesters alleged in a lawsuit. The onslaught “was so intense and violent” that the protester, who was in the back, said she was overwhelmed.

The protester said Heimbach and his group had insinuated their way into the middle of the crowd, and when a moment of tension arrived they suddenly turned violent, and other men around them mirrored their behavior, shouting, pushing, furious. Trump, from the stage, had called: “Get ’em out!”

American neo-Nazis look at Golden Dawn’s rise and take hope. Heimbach has met with far-right nationalists across Europe, he said, including three visits with Golden Dawn over the past three years.

Heimbach can put on a show of moderation. He doesn’t think everyone should have to live in a white ethno-state. That’s just his preference. He doesn’t hate other races. He just thinks that black Americans have, on average, a “lower future time orientation”.

But Trump’s rise to power has encouraged the extremists to try to bridge their divides. Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan leaders were jubilant over an openly xenophobic, politically incorrect presidential candidate who promised to stop illegal immigration and enact a Muslim ban – and they have pursued news coverage, attracting headlines and staging dramatic photos

He is a Holocaust denier, believing that the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazi regime did not happen, that it’s all a “Bolshevik conspiracy”. He has expressed sympathy for the racist killer Dylann Roof and praised white supremacist Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

Real Christianity, he said, is “patriarchal, homophobic, racist and antisemitic”. He laughed. “I see that as a good thing.”

Heimbach lives in Paoli, Indiana, with his wife and son; his fellow party leader, Matt Parrott; and Jason, the young white nationalist who moved from New York City to join him and who now edits his video projects and produces white nationalist music. Three other white families who support their views have moved to Paoli to join them, Heimbach said – two from northern Indiana, one from Virginia. They try to get together weekly for board game nights and home-brewed mead. They play Risk – “of course, the battle of world domination” – and Cards Against Humanity.

“My parents didn’t exactly know what I was thinking or up to. I think in modern America, [there are] a tremendous amount of parents who would be horrified and scandalized with what their young sons and daughters are reading on white nationalist forums or reading on the Daily Stormer,” he said.

“My folks said that they didn’t raise me like this, that they didn’t approve of this and that I had to make a choice, if I was going to do this or choose my family. And I said to them, this is choosing my family, because I want my siblings and their grandchildren to have a future. They didn’t understand.”

Heimbach’s speech was well received. But as the night went on, the divide between the traditional neo-Nazi groups and the new, internet-savvy “alt-right” began to show. The speeches grew so dull, despite the periodic Nazi salutes and chants of white power, that most of the younger extremists melted away into the dark, leaving a smaller and smaller audience to listen to old Nazis drone on.

In the political analysis of Trump voters, neo-Nazi advocates like Heimbach and some on the left tend to agree: Trump voters are a white identity movement, motivated to vote for him at least in part by outright racism, a claim Trump supporters vehemently reject.

The locals in Pikeville greeted the influx with outrage and shock. Outside a Pikeville tattoo parlor the day before the neo-Nazis were coming to town, a group of local men expressed disgust at the agenda and concern that the event would discourage students of different races from coming to the local university.

Both women were increasingly angry that Heimbach had chosen to come to Kentucky to spread his message. “He’s targeting us,” Wooton said, “because he thinks that we’re stupid.” “And he’s wrong about that,” Porter said.

Still, despite the home-team advantage of the Christians in the survey, who made up more than two-thirds of the sample, Jews got the highest overall ratings.

A century ago, when Jewish emigration from Central and Eastern Europe was at its peak, American anti-Semitism was common and fierce.

The world at large is full of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Jews, it seems, are not universally accepted; their cool-kid status is unique to America. So why is it different here? Why, despite the anti-Semitism that still exists in the United States, are Americans mostly down with the Jews?

It is a hard message for many Colombians, who still have the trauma of kidnappings and killings fresh in their minds, but one which seems to have already had an important effect.

the intellectual right effectively dismissed the book

Here is David Brooks, echoing the conservative consensus in 2006:

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.

The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preacher

Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.

Christianism starts, as critical theory does, by attacking the core of the Founding: in particular, its Enlightenment defense of universal reason, and its revolutionary removal of religion from the state.

Mike Johnson’s guru, pseudo-historian David Barton, claims that the Founders were just like evangelicals today, and intended the government at all levels to enforce “Christian values” — primarily, it seems, with respect to the private lives of others. As Pete Wehner notes, “If you listen to Johnson speak on the ‘so-called separation of Church and state’ and claim that ‘the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,’ you will hear echoes of Barton.”

Christianism is a way to think about politics without actually thinking. Johnson expressed this beautifully last week: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.

this tells us nothing, of course. The Bible demands interpretation in almost every sentence and almost every word; it contains universes of moral thought and thesauri of ambiguous words in a different ancient language; it has no clear blueprint for contemporary American politics, period

Yet Johnson uses it as an absolute authority to back up any policy he might support

The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism

Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.

And of course you do what you can to make sure that God’s will be done — by attempting to overturn the election results if necessary.

Christianism is a just-so story, with no deep moral conflicts. Material wealth does not pose a moral challenge, for example, as it has done for Christians for millennia. For Christianists, it’s merely proof that God has blessed you and you deserve it.

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.” That means that Trump was blessed by God, and not just by the Electoral College in 2016. And because he was blessed by God, it was impossible that Biden beat him fairly in 2020.

More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.

since the Tea Party, the turnover in primary challenges in these evangelical districts has been historic — a RINO-shredding machine. No wonder there were crosses being carried on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. The insurrectionists were merely following God’s will. And Trump’s legal team was filled with the faithful.

Tom Edsall shows the skew that has turned American politics into something of a religious war: “When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats.”

the overwhelming majority of the Republican House Caucus (70%) represents the Most Evangelical districts (top two quintiles). Thus, we can see that a group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives.

And almost all those districts are safe as houses. When you add Christianism to gerrymandering, you get a caucus that has no incentive to do anything but perform for the cable shows.

This is not a caucus interested in actually doing anything.

I don’t know how we best break the grip of the fundamentalist psyche on the right. It’s a deep human tendency — to give over control to a patriarch or a holy book rather than engage in the difficult process of democratic interaction with others, compromise, and common ground.

he phenomenon has been given new life by a charismatic con-man in Donald Trump, preternaturally able to corral the cultural fears and anxieties of those with brittle, politicized faith.

What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict

It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants. Johnson is a reminder of that.

It’ll be a personality cult, without a hint of optimism, and certainly no overarching governing philosophy

In temperament and judgment, this is now Trump’s party. And take him at his word: His supporters will riot, as he predicted this week, if he doesn’t get his way.

There is no getting around how much Trump’s followers now echo his darkest sentiments. In Tuesday’s exit polls, huge majorities of Trump supporters backed his call to ban Muslims from entering the country, and for rounding up and deporting 11 million illegal immigrants.

This month, members of the Republican national security community issued a strongly worded missive against Trump. They said his trade policies would be a “recipe for economic disaster,” that his embrace of torture was “inexcusable,” that his anti-Muslim campaign would badly damage American interests abroad, and on and on and on.

Where were these people six months ago? Laughing at the orange-haired clown with the rest us. But if this who’s who of Republican foreign policy cardinals is serious about their words, they have no choice but to leave the party this summer. Either that or accept the man who said he got foreign policy advice “speaking with myself.” For him, a glance in the mirror is enough. “I have a very good brain,” Trump said.

Some policy experts say it can and should survive, with or without the United States.

US officials "stand completely alone on being climate deniers," Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, told me. "If you look at the speeches from Paris, all the heads of state who came -- all -- and even fossil fuel providers, identified this as a real, science-based issue that they're working to solve together."

There's only so much carbon the world can pump into the atmosphere before we're assured of screwing up the targets set in the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

By some calculations, we're only five, 10 or perhaps 20-some years away from those red lines if the world keeps polluting at the same staggering rate.

Sterman calculated that the United States pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and canceling many Obama-era climate regulations, including the Clean Power Plan, would increase global temperatures on the order of a few tenths of a degree by 2100. That assumes, however, the rest of the world keeps making aggressive cuts. "Assuming that all nations, including the US, aggressively cut emissions, would yield 1.9 degrees Celsius [of warming] by 2100," he said. "But if the US does nothing, then expected warming rises to 2.2 degrees Celsius by 2100."

Current pledges made as part of the Paris Agreement, including US commitments, put the world at about 3.4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, according to Sterman and Climate Interactive. If the entire agreement fell apart and global emissions continued at their current clip, the planet could expect 4.2 degrees of warming.

That could be truly catastrophic. At 6 degrees of warming, for instance, "most of the planetary surface would be functionally uninhabitable," according to Mark Lynas, author of "Six Degrees."

Nearly seven in 10 registered voters in the United States say the country "should participate in the international agreement to curb global warming," according to a November 2016 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

hard-core, bought-and-paid-for denialism is pernicious for many reasons — in fact, it may help explain why so few Americans believe “most scientists think global warming is happening.” According to the most recent Yale Climate Opinion Survey, just 49 percent do.

what is perhaps most remarkable about that same study is that many more Americans believe climate change is happening than believe scientists believe it: 70 percent say global warming is real, and ongoing, versus just 14 percent who say it isn’t.

One way of looking at that data is to say that we are, despite what we hear in the media, overwhelmingly a nation of climate-change believers, not deniers — and, in fact, a nation genuinely concerned about it

“denial is mostly a distraction at this point.” (“Those still unconvinced mostly cannot or do not want to be convinced,” he added, meaning, “It’s time to stop framing persuasion as the primary task here.”)

Another is that even those of us who believe in warming, and believe it is a problem, do not believe enough in it

the rest of us are only moderately worried, perhaps in part because we imagine the worst impacts of climate change will hit elsewhere. Forty-one percent of Americans believe climate change “will harm me personally” — actually quite a high number, in absolute terms, but considerably lower than the 62 percent who believe it will harm those in the developing world or the 70 percent who believe it will harm future generations

What are those coping mechanisms? Why can’t we see the threat right in front of us?

It’s fucking scary. For years now, researchers have known that “unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait,” one that, whatever you know about how social-media addicts get used to bad news, leads us to discount scary information and embrace the sunnier stuff

the generation of economists and behavioral psychologists who’ve spent the last few decades enumerating all of our cognitive biases have compiled a whole literature of problems with how we process the world, almost every single example of which distorts and distends our perception of a changing climate, typically by making us discount the threat.

anchoring, which explains how we build mental models around as few as one or two initial examples, no matter how unrepresentative — in the case of global warming, the world we know today, which is reassuringly temperate

the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it

In theory, with climate, uncertainty should be an argument for action — much of the ambiguity arises from the range of possible human inputs, a quite concrete prompt we choose to process instead as a riddle, which discourages us

anthropocentric thinking, by which we build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that some especially ruthless environmentalists have derided as “human supremacy” and that surely shapes our ability to apprehend genuinely existential threats to the species — a shortcoming that many climate scientists have mocked. “The planet will survive,” they say. “It’s the humans that may not.”

Among the most destructive effects that appear later in the library are these:

the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves;

confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world

the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is

the endowment effect, or the instinct to demand more to give up something we have — more than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it)

We have an illusion of control, the behavioral economists tell us, and also suffer from overconfidence. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.

Already, Yale says, 70 percent of Americans believe “environmental protection is more important than economic growth.” Nudging that number up to 75 percent isn’t the important thing; what’s important is getting those 70 percent to feel their conviction fiercely, to elevate action on climate change to a first-order political priority by speaking loudly about it and to disempower, however we can, those forces conspiring to silence us.

Even the ones in our own heads.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued a statement on Friday that targeted climate change deniers. “Our young people understand climate change is no longer up for debate — it’s reality based in science.”

The decision to prohibit school staff members from participating in demonstrations underscored how hard it is to separate the politics of climate change from teaching the science of it — even in liberal-leaning New York, and even in a school system that some experts consider a national leader in bringing climate-related issues to the classroom.

we are missing the major point. Like Trump’s six previous Republican presidential candidates (and like many Trump supporters), all of the major 2020 Democratic candidates are decent human beings.

In Episode 8 of the second season of the HBO series “Succession,” Logan Roy’s brother says this about the media tycoon, “He's morally bankrupt. . . . In terms of the lives that will be lost by his whoring for the climate change deniers, there's a very persuasive argument to be made that he's worse than Hitler.”

For many, now and in the future, the 2020 presidential election may not just be an ordinary U.S. election, but quite literally a matter of life or death. 

zombie ideas haven’t eaten just Republicans’ brains. They have also eaten the party’s soul.

Think about what is now required for a Republican politician to be considered a party member in good standing. He or she must pledge allegiance to policy doctrines that are demonstrably false; he or she must, in effect, reject the very idea of paying attention to evidence.

There used to be Republican politicians who were more than that, but they were mainly holdovers from an earlier era, and at this point have all left the scene, one way or another. John McCain may well have been the last of his kind.

What’s left now is a party that, as far as I can tell, contains no politicians of principle; anyone who does have principles has been driven out.

you might have hoped that there would be some limits to what these apparatchiks would accept, that even they would draw the line at gross abuses of power and collusion with foreign autocrats

there is no line. If Trump wants to dismantle democracy and rule of law (which he does), his party will stand with him all the way.

Demagogues found popular support for their demand to keep Jewish refugees out of the country. Mr. Dinnerstein describes an anti-Semitic speaker warning of “200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country,” adding that “if they are admitted they will rape every woman and child that is left unprotected.

Today, these tropes feel familiar but in a new context. Mr. Trump started his political career by amplifying rumors that President Barack Obama was secretly Muslim. He resurrected the disgraced slogan “America First.” In October, he warned that Hillary Clinton was meeting “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.” Mr. Trump called for refugees to be kept out of the country, smearing them as agents of a sinister foreign ideology. Breitbart, the website formerly run by Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, has run a stream of alarmist articles about refugee rapists

In the Trump administration’s conspiratorial nationalism, avowed anti-Semites hear their overarching narratives reflected back to them, their prejudices tacitly approved.

During the presidential campaign, Michael T. Flynn, who would briefly serve as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, retweeted someone attacking CNN with the words, “Not anymore, Jews, not anymore.” (Mr. Flynn later apologized.)

Under Mr. Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart defended online anti-Semitism as subversive good fun and published a column attacking the conservative writer Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew.”

In power, the new administration, too, seemed to be trolling the Jewish community. In January, the White House released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention Jews. A spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, told CNN the omission was intentional, because the administration “took into account all of those who suffered” — echoing the position of neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers who seek to play down the genocide of Jews.

At an inauguration ball, Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart editor who was soon to become a White House adviser, wore a medal associated with a Nazi-collaborationist Hungarian group, the Vitezi Rend. The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported that Mr. Gorka was a sworn member of the group. (Mr. Gorka claimed he wore the medal to honor his father, from whom he “inherited” Vitezi Rend membership.)

This is where we are now: A senior administration official dons fascist paraphernalia, defends himself by saying he did so out of filial loyalty, and suffers no political repercussions

Naturally, many Jews find this chilling, but we should not lose sight of the real import of Mr. Gorka’s appointment. He may flirt with anti-Semitic iconography for sentimental reasons, but he owes his career to his apocalyptic view of America’s war with radical Islam. The Islamic State, he claimed last year, “is already well entrenched on the shores of the United States.

When the National Cathedral hosted a Muslim prayer service in a gesture of ecumenical good will, Mr. Gorka published a Breitbart column headlined: “Muslim Brotherhood Overruns National Cathedral in D.C.”

Last year, Michael Anton, now a White House national security staffer, wrote a pseudonymous essay arguing that “mass immigration has overwhelmed, eroded, and de-Americanized formerly American communities.” He was particularly contemptuous of Muslim immigration. Yes, he allowed, “not all Muslims are terrorists, blah, blah, blah, etc. Even so, what good has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people?”

To be an American Muslim or a brown-skinned immigrant and know that people like this are in power must be terrifying. Mr. Trump and his appointees have consistently denigrated and dehumanized these minorities in ways we’d never tolerate if they were talking about Jews.

The president and his cronies talk a lot about representing “the people,” but they don’t mean all Americans. “The only important thing is the unification of the people,” Mr. Trump said at Eugene, Ore., campaign rally last year, “because the other people don’t mean anything.”

Naturally, a government that decides certain groups of people “don’t mean anything” shakes many Jews to the core. But the horror of the president’s vision isn’t that “the other people” might include Jews. It includes people. Even in this brutally tribal moment, that should be enough.

The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement

His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.

the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.

Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s

Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi

“What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”

the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity

His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.

The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .

As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.

we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.

“Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”

it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.

As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.

The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied

Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.

ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.

He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment

If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary

He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 

It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”

Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.

But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.

To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect

Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.

Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)

Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar

Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this

He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers

When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.

But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it

He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.

On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.

To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.

In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.

their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing

It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.

Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become

The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will

it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.

All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,

In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern

It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces

The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one

In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”

. For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans

the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.

Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.

that was before House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declined to punish the execrable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, other than a statement condemning her views. The QAnon follower's embrace of baseless conspiracy theories, along with violent, racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic statements are repulsive not just to many Americans, but to decent people around the world.

McCarthy presided over a meeting weighing the fate of Greene and of Rep. Liz Cheney, who committed the grave sin of condemning former President Donald Trump for inciting a mob to attack the Capitol in an assault on American democracy so stunning that even McCarthy briefly found his spine and criticized Trump.

Cheney survived a vote to remove her from leadership by a vote of 145- 61. And Greene, after apologizing to her colleagues in the closed-door party meeting Wednesday night, was not penalized, but met with a standing ovation.

Greene offered what largely amounted to a non-apology, expressing regret for some of her past comments. Hours later, in a dramatic Congressional session, 219 House Democrats, along with 11 Republicans, did what McCarthy should have and stripped Greene of her committee assignments.

By embracing Greene, Republicans are moving the Overton window, the range of views that are considered politically acceptable. Unfortunately, that has an impact on the entire country, however much the Democrats try to correct for the moral failings of Republicans.

After the closed-door meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy justified his inaction on Greene by saying, "This Republican Party's a very big tent, everyone's invited in."

But the tent is becoming increasingly comfortable for racists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and reality deniers.

It's the party of the twice impeached Trump, a man who Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham described in 2015 as "a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot," who "doesn't represent my party."

Graham, as we know, did a 180 on Trump. He, too, found integrity too politically risky, and debased himself by embracing Trump.

It was the tolerance of Trump's rhetoric -- which was previously considered beyond the pale -- that paved the road to Greene's election and the attack on the Capitol last month.

Just two years ago, Republicans stripped Rep. Steve King from all committee assignments. King, who had made countless racist statements, had asked in an interview with the New York Times, "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization -- how did that language become offensive."

"That is not the party of Lincoln," he declared, "and it's definitely not American."

The party has changed.

Like many elected Republicans, Greene rejected the incontrovertible fact that President Joe Biden won the election. But she goes much further. She repeatedly showed support on social media for assassinating prominent Democrats, shared an image of herself holding a gun alongside other congresswomen with a caption that mentioned going "on the offense against these socialists" and claimed the 2018 California wildfires were deliberately set by a Jewish financier using a space laser.

When Greene was still a candidate running for Congress, the Republican Party initially distanced itself from her.

Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republicans' number two, went even further, calling her statements "disgusting," and added they "don't reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great."

But then Trump threw his arms around his fervent admirer, calling her "a real WINNER," and a "future Republican star."

On Wednesday, McCarthy defended Greene and said, "I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us -- denouncing Q-on, I don't know if I say it right," McCarthy disingenuously claimed, "I don't even know what it is.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, seems to be an outlier among Republican leadership in condemning Greene. "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are a cancer for the Republican Party and our country. Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality."

The GOP welcomed into the fold an extremist, during a time when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered an urgent examination of extremism in US military ranks; during a time when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the threat of domestic terrorism is "persistent."

The new domestic terrorist threat comes from the extremist fringes that espouse the same ideas that McCarthy seemed to welcome into the GOP's "very big tent."

Extremists and their supporters are winning battles in the Republican civil war, and the entire country is paying a price.