We begin today with Charles Blow of The New York Times, pointing out that most Americans don’t know what “Christian nationalism” is and, therefore, cannot identify the heresy of the doctrine within attempts to rewrite American history.
A survey published in October by Pew Research Center found that most American adults had never heard anything about Christian nationalism, and almost one in 10 who’ve heard “at least a little” about it didn’t know enough to offer an opinion.
One survey respondent described Christian nationalism as “patriotic Christians who believe in God, family and country, morality and kindness.” And I suspect that many people just think of Christian nationalists as patriotic white people who go to church — akin to the definition of white nationalism that Senator Tommy Tuberville was recently trying to sell.
But Christian nationalism isn’t merely “patriotic Christians” and it’s not Christianity, but rather, as the University of Oklahoma sociologist Samuel Perry
put it, can be understood as “an impostor Christianity that uses evangelical language to cloak ethnocentric and nationalist loyalties.”
And DeSantis is a paragon among the impostors. His anti-woke crusade is a manifestation of the intolerance and battle-thirst of Christian nationalism, and Florida’s distortion of Black history and its attempt to rehabilitate the image of slavery is part of it.
Rex Huppke of USA Today presents “both sides” of the now-dead plea deal regarding Hunter Biden as only Rex Huppke can.
President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was in court to accept a deal with federal prosecutors in which he would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and agree to enter a diversion program for a firearms charge.
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The two sides hammered out a modified plea agreement that more specifically addressed the immunity issues, but the judge told the prosecution and the defense to keep working on the new agreement. There will be another hearing in the coming weeks once Noreika has had time to review details of the new deal.
As a formality, Biden entered a not guilty plea, which can change at the next hearing if a deal is approved.
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If you’re oarless and rudderless – as many in the Hunter-Biden-conspiracy world are – Wednesday’s developments required some high-level mental gymnastics.
You see, the plea deal was a “sweetheart deal” that came about because President Biden controls a thing called the Deep State, and the Deep State controls the Department of Justice, so the DOJ sneakily used a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney– Weiss – to protect the president’s son by … getting him to plead guilty to fairly serious tax evasion charges.
If that doesn’t make sense, then you’re following along perfectly.
Julia Azari of POLITICO (!) evaluates the vice presidency of Kamala Harris in the context of what modern vice presidents do … and Harris comes off pretty well.
Scholarship on the vice presidency, the presidency and American politics points to the possibility that Harris serves at the tricky crossroads of two developments that cut in opposite directions. On the one hand, the vice presidency has been strengthened over the course of the past 40 years, raising expectations for how much power and influence she should wield in the job. On the other, party dynamics mean that vice presidents are tasked with enhancing the appeal of presidential administrations to different elements of their parties, and partisan polarization makes it unlikely that they’ll do so while attracting much cross-aisle support.
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Like other vice presidents before her, Harris is an important party liaison. Part of the idea behind selecting Harris was to make up for criticism within the Democratic coalition that Biden was too old, too centrist and too much like the last 40-some presidents — and too little like the modern Democratic Party demographically. Recent research on the impact of vice presidential candidates suggests that while no one votes for the vice president, exactly, the choice of running mate can affect how voters see the presidential candidate’s priorities. The selection of Harris said that Biden valued diversity and understood who the key groups in the Democratic Party were.
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Harris also serves in a different context, in which partisan polarization runs deep, and identity issues are at the center of many of these disagreements. Her outreach to key Democratic groups carries the expectation of what political scientists call “descriptive representation” — that she’ll be able to effectively translate the concerns of women and people of color into governing priorities and achievements.
And that’s where things get much more difficult.
Leonard Pitts Jr.comes out of retirement to write about the restoration of a Miami cemetery for the Miami Herald.
But beginning Aug. 3, the Coral Gables Museum invites us to remember. On that day and continuing until Nov. 6, an exhibit called “Sacred Ground: The Rise, Fall and Revival of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery” will take up residence at the museum. Through a display of telegrams, video, artifacts, historical documents and images from photographers including Carl Juste and C.W. Griffin, the museum will tell the story of the cemetery, its citizens and the Miami they knew. It’s a necessary tale.
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The people buried at Lincoln are not, to be sure, the only ones denied memory. There are other urban cemeteries in South Florida — indeed, across the country — where the only caretaker is neglect, and African Americans lie in forgotten repose. Earlier this month, a backhoe operator stumbled upon a femur while working on the site of a new school near Houston.
It turned out to be the final resting place of 95 African Americans, victims of a forced labor prison — de facto slavery — during the Jim Crow era.
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America forgets such things because they are easy to forget. And we forget them because they are necessary to forget, because they give the lie to our national mythology. America has to forget them because otherwise, how can you gaze upon the construction cranes, how can you feel the Jet Ski spray, how can you hear the rustle of the leaves in the palm fronds, in quite the same innocent and oblivious way?
As Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visits the White House and President Joe Biden today, David Broder of The New York Times reminds us of how dangerous Meloni remains—in spite of winning acclaim in international circles.
Since becoming prime minister, Ms. Meloni has certainly moderated her language. In official settings, she’s at pains to appear considered and cautious — an act aided by her preference for televised addresses rather than questioning by journalists. Yet she can also rely on colleagues in her Brothers of Italy party to be less restrained. Taking aim at one of the government’s main targets, L.G.B.T.Q. parents, party leaders have called surrogate parenting a “crime worse than pedophilia,” claiming that gay people are “passing off” foreign kids as their own. Ms. Meloni can appear aloof from such rhetoric, even suggesting unhappiness with its extremism. But her decisions in office reflect zealotry, not caution. The government extended a ban on surrogacy to criminalize adoptions in other countries and ordered municipalities to stop registering same-sex parents, leaving children in legal limbo.
It’s a similar story with immigration. The agriculture minister, a longtime ally of Ms. Meloni’s who is also her brother-in-law, has taken the lead in appealing for resistance to “ethnic replacement.” Hardly averse to the slogan — she used it to successfully oppose a 2017 bill that would have granted citizenship to children born in Italy to noncitizen parents — Ms. Meloni has avoided employing the phrase herself since taking office. But her call for “births, not migrants” expresses the same sentiment, and aggressive opposition to migration has been the centerpiece of her administration. A law passed in April forces asylum seekers to live in state-run migrant centers while their claims are considered — a process that can last up to two years — all without legal advice or Italian-language classes. In recent weeks, Ms. Meloni spearheaded a European Union deal with Tunisia, whose authoritarian regime promotes the great replacement conspiracy theory, to curb migration in exchange for financial support.
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Journalists, too, are under pressure. Sitting ministers have threatened — and in some cases pursued — a raft of libel suits against the Italian press in an apparent bid to intimidate critics. The public broadcaster RAI is also under threat, and not just because its mission for the next five years includes “promoting birthrates.” After its chief executive and leading presenters resigned citing political pressure from the new government, it now resembles “Tele-Meloni,” with rampant handpicking of personnel. The new director general, Giampaolo Rossi, is a pro-Meloni hard-liner who previously distinguished himself as an organizer of an annual Brothers of Italy festival. In the aftermath of his appointment, news outlets published scores of his anti-immigration social media posts and an interview with a neofascist journal in which he condemned the antifascist “caricature” hanging over public life.
Paul Melly of BBC News reports on a Russia-Africa summit taking place in St. Petersburg.
Unlike the previous Russia-Africa summit in 2019, attended by 43 African leaders, this time only 17 are expected in St Petersburg.
But which of them will take prominent speaking roles in the summit? What deals will be struck with Mr Putin?
European and US policymakers until recently saw China as their main competitor in Africa - but now find themselves observing with deep unease Russia's assertive return, epitomised by the presence of Wagner mercenaries in Mali, the Central African Republic (CAR), Libya and, briefly, northern Mozambique.
And of course, the invasion of Ukraine has dramatically heightened Western mistrust of Russia's ambitions around the world.
Yet little suggests that African leaders share this perspective. Most countries on the continent, even those that have regularly voted at the UN to condemn the attack on Ukraine and its impact, do not want to get drawn into taking sides in a new "Cold War" or become pawns in a tussle for global influence and powerplays.
As an aside, when I was selected for a preliminary jury panel this past Tuesday, the judge asked the panel to identify some news sources. Five people out of my panel of about 22-25 specifically identified the BBC as a primary news source and I was not one of the five.
Finally today,
Hugh Linehan of The Irish Times writes about Wednesday’s death of Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor at the age of 56.
For many, she embodied a raw, take-no-prisoners defiance in the face of trauma and abuse. Others admired and loved her but were alarmed by her apparent mental fragility and vulnerability.
From the earliest stages of her musical career, she announced herself as a new and very different sort of female artist in a music scene defined and controlled by male expectations. By her early 20s, she had become an international superstar, but her fierce honesty about her personal beliefs, along with a refusal to remain silent about her own experience of trauma and mental health issues, meant she was incapable of playing the game which the global mass entertainment industry demands from performers.
It was a turbulent life from the beginning. A family separation, a troubled childhood and a rebellious adolescence, including 18 months of institutional incarceration in a Magdalene institution – “I steal everything. I’m not a nice person. I’m trouble,” she would recall in her memoir – were the prelude to an early creative flowering, when she discovered her voice as a writer and singer.
Have the best possible day, everyone!