Opinion

Last week, the Post updated a report on the number of Republican candidates who “have denied or questioned” the result of the last presidential election. It had been a near-majority. It’s a majority now.

The Post found that 53 percent of 569 campaigns had “refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory [and] are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in three states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races.”

For Republicans, the purpose of religion is — as it has been for authoritarians since Old Testament days — political and social control. It’s not about spirituality: it’s all about raw, naked, taxpayer-subsidized power and the wealth associated with it.

A Michigan county Republican Party just posted a video showing picture after picture of that state’s Democratic politicians, starting with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who right-wing terrorists have already tried to kidnap and murder.

According to the media and the House committee investigating January 6, the face of rising fascism has been a young one. Or young-ish, anyway, especially in a graying country like the United States. A lot of attention has been paid to the incel and 4chan communities, or other places where young men in their teens and early 20s are being radicalized. The 2017 "Unite the Right" riot in Charlottesville, Virginia crystallized the image of modern fascists as college-aged men with floppy haircuts and polo shirts. A number of authoritarian groups have grown up under Trump, but by far the most attention has been paid to the Proud Boys, whose name and manner of dress cast an image of youthful streetfighters. In the American imagination, "fascists" are young men, such as Hitler's Brownshirts, who are believed to have the energy and stomach for the skull-cracking necessary to impose their will to power.

As demonstrated by January 6 and the years of street fights in Portland, Oregon, this threat of relatively youthful violence should not be ignored. But there's a quieter, more pernicious threat to democracy: Older, retiree-aged Trump fanatics.

After watching Donald Trump's two back-to-back rallies this weekend, one in Nevada and another in Arizona, it's hard to escape the idea that he must want to be prosecuted. It's unimaginable that anyone who is under investigation by the FBI would say the things he said if he didn't. Of course, most observers will simply say that it's the usual Trump hyperbole, meant to convince his followers of his innocence — but he's in the maw of the criminal justice system now, and it doesn't work that way. Trump's running commentary must have the leadership of the Department of Justice asking themselves if there will be still be such a thing as the rule of law if he gets away with it.

We learned a couple of weeks ago that Trump's most competent attorney, Christopher Kise (who he paid $3 million up front, which is highly uncharacteristic) was advising him to shut his mouth and start thinking about ways to negotiate with the DOJ regarding the stolen documents. The Washington Post reported:

Eight months ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, describing it as a "special military operation." Most military analysts expected an easy victory. The Russians had a significant numerical advantage in personnel and equipment, much greater firepower, air and naval superiority and seemingly bottomless resources with which to impose its will. It was reasonable to believe that Russia would conquer Ukraine rapidly and then replace the existing government before declaring "victory".

Of course, that did not happen.

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Everyone knows how the day unfolded: Trump's speech in which he urged "if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." Swarms of incensed rioters at the Capitol, police officers and rioters killed and injured, and so many other details of that day that will remain etched in the memory of those who lived through it. It was the ultimate, real-life manifestation of the Far Right 2.0's uninterrupted online activity, with each corner of the movement represented in some way or another as they converged in D.C. There were shirts, flags and hats with QAnon mantras like "Trust the Plan" and emblems of militia movements like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers. There were Confederate flags and rope nooses. Inside the Capitol building, a man with a shirt reading "CAMP AUSCHWITZ…WORK BRINGS FREEDOM" stormed through the halls beside another individual in a TRUMP 2020 hat, helping hold up a broken piece of a nameplate reading, "SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE NANCY PELOSI."

And with the United States still sifting through the rubble of that day, we watched the same maddeningly familiar script play out once more.

A middle class, when mishandled, can be a powerful and fearsome thing, as the rulers of Iran and Russia are discovering. Both regimes are now teetering on the edge of collapse because of popular uprisings that would not have happened without a middle-class in each country.

People paralyzed by grinding poverty rarely revolt — it takes a lot to produce “barrio uprisings” — because their lives are consumed with day-to-day survival issues.

With the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new session on Oct. 3, 2022, Clarence Thomas is arguably the most powerful justice on the nation’s highest court.

In 1991, after Thomas became an associate justice and only the second African American to do so, his power was improbable to almost everyone except him and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.

What do we choose to remember about our ancestors? And beyond putting them on genealogy charts, what do we choose to remember about what they did and stood for?

As a nation, we carry with us the legacy of ancestors who fought to preserve slavery. Whether we trace our individual family trees to them or not, we have been collectively shaped by what they did and what they stood for. Yet, until recently, we have mostly chosen to forget them or bury them in gauzy historical apologies.

Despite my Italian heritage, I don't understand the adulation that some Italian-Americans continue to bestow on Christopher Columbus, who, as history demonstrates, was less a hero than a thug, exploiting and enslaving indigenous peoples.

But the real culprit behind the subjugation of non-European peoples across the globe wasn't an individual, or even a monarch. It was the Roman Catholic Church. It's time the church owned that grievous mistake.