The former president gave a short eloquent speech in Dallas at the memorial service for five police officers murdered by a sniper. In a slap at Donald Trump, a man loathed by the Bush family, W. said: “We do not want the unity of grief nor do we want the unity of fear. We want the unity of hope, affection and high purpose.”
.. The section details suspicious ties between the hijackers — 15 out of 19 were Saudis — and other Qaeda operatives to the Saudi royal family. In one instance, the first Qaeda prisoner in C.I.A. custody post-9/11 had a phone number that belonged to a company that took care of Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s Colorado home. The former Saudi ambassador was so close to the Bushes he was known as Bandar Bush... If the 28 pages had been released back in 2002, the revelations might have helped stop the Iraq invasion by refocusing attention where it belonged: on possible real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi royals, rather than the fantasy links between Al Qaeda and Saddam pushed by Dick Cheney... W. told Blair he was “ready to kick ass.”
Epidsode 207: “Confident Pluralism” with John Inazu
Skye: I’m no longer surprised by the number of Christians who take pride in being afraid. (26 min)
The millennials have a distaste for the national power politics like the church took in the 1980s and 90s.
That activism was for the church rather than society/others.
When Christians have had power, they have used it for bad ends (30 min)
What do you do when you encounter hypersensitive people who are not confident, who want to be fully accepted/embraced? (47 min)
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
With the exceptions of London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, every major region of the U.K. voted to exit the E.U.
.. One of the best predictors of how people voted was their education level. Those with college degrees tended to opt for Remain, while people without them tended to opt for Leave.
.. The older and poorer you are, the more likely you were to vote Leave. The younger and richer you are, the more likely you were to vote Remain.
.. The Leave side went up in the polls after it managed to shift the debate away from the likely economic impact of Brexit and onto immigration and issues of national sovereignty. Although much of the immigration into the U.K. comes from outside of the E.U., the Leave forces were able to focus attention on the freedom of movement for workers, which is one of the founding principles of the E.U.
.. economic anxieties and resentments underpinned the political anger that fuelled the Leave vote. Demagogues such as Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, were able to exploit these economic worries, directing them against immigrants and other easy targets.
.. the best predictor of voting patterns wasn’t income or education levels but attitudes toward the death penalty, which are a proxy for authoritarian attitudes more generally.
.. “Wealthy people who back capital punishment back Brexit. Poor folk who oppose the death penalty support Remain.”
.. “The legacy of increased national inequality in the 1980s, the heavy concentration of those costs in certain areas, and our collective failure to address it has more to say about what happened last night than shorter term considerations from the financial crisis or changed migration flows.”
.. the Remain vote was consistently stronger in prosperous areas. Economics matters.
.. he pledged to hold a referendum at some point before 2017. At the time, this was an easy promise to make: Cameron believed he couldn’t deliver on it.
.. Rather than accentuating the positive, Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sought to scare the electorate into voting their way, arguing that a vote for Leave would plunge the U.K. economy into a recession and cost the average household about sixty-two hundred dollars a year.
.. Almost all economists agree that the E.U. has been good to Britain. But the sixty-two-hundred-a-year figure was so large, and so specific, that many people didn’t believe it.
.. the negative campaign, which was dubbed Project Fear, had backfired.
.. Rather than winning people over, it alienated many voters who had legitimate concerns about the E.U. “People have expressed real anger at being ignored by the system, and I think this is at the heart” of what happened, Hilton said.
.. the fate of the Remain campaign should serve as a reminder of the limits of negative campaigning—a reminder that Hillary Clinton would do well to take note of as she goes up against Donald Trump. In confronting populist demagoguery, it isn’t enough to attack its promulgators. To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind.
.. It claimed that liberating Britain from the shackles of the E.U. would enable it to reclaim its former glory. The Remain side argued, in effect, that while the E.U. isn’t great, Britain would be even worse off without it. That turned out to be a losing story.
Donald Trump Responds to Orlando Attack by Exploiting Fear, Not Easing It
In his apocalyptic speech on Monday warning that terrorism could wipe out the United States — “There will be nothing, absolutely nothing, left,” he said — Mr. Trump substituted Muslim immigrants for the wolf pack. A single gunman carried out the Orlando massacre, he said. “Can you imagine what they’ll do in large groups, which we’re allowing now to come here?”
.. Mr. Trump appears wholly focused on the idea that America has reached an existential moment and that only he can save the country, a classic tactic of demagogy.
.. historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recalled that the “aroused demagogic fear” after Pearl Harbor had led to the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II — something Mr. Trump has said that, while he hated the idea, he might have supported at the time.