Opinion

As his presidency was ending, George Washington delivered a farewell address to the nation warning against political parties because they would be divisive. However, few Americans obeyed the Father of the Country as political parties quickly became a salient feature of the American political system. Federalists and Democratic-Republicans would become the first Two-Party system.

Two rules journalists live by: Keep things simple and straightforward and be fair to “both sides.”

Among the large percentage of Americans who are aghast at the election of Donald Trump as president, one sometimes hears, “How could this have happened? How could we Americans have elected such a clueless fool?” A man who bragged that because he was a “star” he could grab parts of women’s bodies whenever he wished. A man who made so many outlandish statements, many of them reflecting his colossal narcissism, that one hardly knows where to begin.

Being a black constitutional and civil rights attorney with the ACLU can be more emotionally unsettling than I am sometimes willing to admit.

White supremacist racism is shaking Charlottesville and the country.  It is difficult to make sense out of such nonsense.  Protesters chanted “take America back,” “you will not replace us,” and “blood and soil,” a well-known Nazi rallying cry. But they came to fight, not speak, fueled by anger and projecting their own deep anxieties onto the feared “other.”

Recent events in Charlottesville have renewed the debate around whether to take down Confederate memorials and statues, but the latest short film from the Equal Justice Institute’s Lynching in America project shows that much more is needed to truly confront the bitter legacy of slavery and racial injustice.

When I set out to write my novel The Half-Drowned King about Viking-Age Norway, I found only a few other pieces of fiction about Vikings, including Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles, and Juliet Marillier’s Wolfskin. Even the non-fiction written for a general audience was minimal enough for me to read it in a few months and then move onto scholarly works. However, in the last few years, Viking and Viking-inspired fiction has gained popularity, with TV shows like Vikings, The Last Kingdom—a television adaptation of Cornwell’s series, and Game of Thrones, which borrows elements of Viking culture for both the Stark and the Greyjoy families.

America’s culture wars are back. Only this time it’s white identity politics supplanting the religious right. This is a step beyond the GOP’s formula of turning elections into a battle over faith and family, with non-Christian non-traditional values under threat, and the enemy identified as anyone embracing diversity and tolerance.

They’re not just wrong to overlook the fact that slavery was the cause of the war, they’re wrong about this, too.

The crisis that Donald Trump represents cries out for movement toward impeachment and trial to remove him from the Presidency, unless he agrees to resign, or Vice President Mike Pence, in league with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a majority of the Presidential Cabinet agree to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment Section 4, as mentally incompetent to stay in office. Neither of these seems likely at this stage, as we enter the eighth month of the Trump Presidency later in August.

When I first wrote about the growing popularity of Eastern Orthodox Christianity among those on the far-right for Religion Dispatches in November of last year, I was regularly told that Matthew Heimbach’s excommunication from the Orthodox Church was the end of the problem. They told me that in making connections between the so-called alt-right and Orthodoxy I was overreacting.

With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, it’s unlikely Trump will be impeached or thrown out of office on grounds of mental impairment. At least any time soon.

There are those who say that comparing President Donald Trump’s rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler is alarmist, unfair and counterproductive.