In an interview with the American Prospect, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon offers an important insight into why Democrats lost the election and why they’re struggling with identity politics.
“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
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That is as succinct a reading of what happened in the 2016 as any. It is also a prediction about the enduring power of Trump’s strategy. And Bannon may in fact be right — Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, have made the same argument that the left focuses too much on identity politics, to its detriment.
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Yet, in mentioning “identity politics” on the left, and suggesting that no such thing exists on the right, Bannon argues that it’s the left alone that “is focused on race and identity,” and not Trump.
That’s the number of hate groups operating in the US, according to data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Alabama-based nonprofit activist group tracks civil rights and hate crimes and defines a hate group as an organization with “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
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“Over the course of a year, we have a team of investigators that scours the internet for racist publications and real world activities to find out which groups exist, which groups are still active and which groups come along,” said Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter for the SPLC’s Hatewatch project.
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Some are classified as anti-LGBT groups, and some are black separatists, who don’t believe in interracial marriage and want a nation only for black people, according to the group.
Five years ago, George Heimpel, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota, travelled to Trinidad in search of insect larvae.He was after several kinds in particular—Philornis downsi, a fly whose parasitic young feed on the hatchlings of tropical birds, and various minuscule wasp species whose own offspring feed on those of the fly. Heimpel hoped that the wasps might solve a problem on the Galápagos Islands, where Philornis has taken a severe toll on native fowl. Those hurt most by the fly, which was likely brought to the archipelago by people, are the Galápagos finches, the songbirds that provided Charles Darwin with some of the earliest evidence of evolution. Currently, eleven of the fourteen finch species are confirmed prey of Philornis larvae, which gorge on the young birds’ blood. With a mortality rate nearing a hundred per cent in some species, the chicks are dropping like, well, flies. The critically endangered mangrove finch is particularly imperilled: if Philornis isn’t stopped, the bird could disappear in a matter of decades, according to mathematical simulations from the University of Utah. It would be the first extinction to befall a Galápagos finch since humans came to the islands, in 1535.
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Galápagos finches, which helped inspire the theory of evolution, are under urgent threat. Will a controversial scientific technique be their deliverance?
Not much about Makoto Koike’s adult life suggests that he would be a farmer. Trained as an engineer, he spent most of his career in a busy urban section of Aichi Prefecture, Japan, near the headquarters of the Toyota Motor Corporation, writing software to control cars. Koike’s longtime hobby is tinkering with electronic kits and machines; he is not naturally an outdoorsy type. Yet, in 2014, at the age of thirty-three, he left his job and city life to move to his parents’ cucumber farm, in the greener prefecture of Shizuoka. “I thought I was getting old,” Koike told me. “I wanted to be close to my home and my family.”
The Koikes have been growing cucumbers in Kosai, a town wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the brackish Lake Hamana, for nearly fifty years. Their crop, which fills three small greenhouses, grows year-round. Koike’s father, Harumi, plants the seeds; Koike oversees their cultivation; and his mother, Masako, sorts the harvest. This last job is particularly important in Japan, which is famously discerning about its produce. Nice strawberries can fetch several dollars apiece in some markets, and a sublime cubic watermelon can go for hundreds. Vegetables hold a less privileged place than fruits, but supermarkets rarely stock produce that is at all irregular in shape or size. The Koikes send their better cucumbers, the ones that are straight and uniform in thickness, to wholesalers. The not-so-perfect ones go to local stands, where they are sold at half price. (“They taste the same,” Koike said.) Masako judges the vegetables one by one, separating them into bins. Though she devotes only half a second to each cucumber, the task takes up most of her work time; on some days, she goes through around four thousand of them.
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For decades, Makoto Koike’s mother has been sorting cucumbers by hand. Now he is trying to teach a machine to replace her.
Former CIA director John Brennan slammed President Donald Trump’s “dangerous” and “ugly” comments on the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — writing a personal letter to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after “The Situation Room” anchor spoke publicly about the fact that he lost all four grandparents to the evils of Nazism.
In a rare move, top commanders in the US military are speaking out in the wake of the deadly violence that erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.
Five US Joint Chiefs are issuing public condemnations of white supremacist groups in the wake of the weekend’s racial unrest. President Donald Trump expanded the controversy Tuesday when he appeared to draw a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and counter-protesters by blaming “both sides” for contributing to violence.
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The statements are not directly addressing Trump’s comments but are instead presented as a message to the general public, their troops and potential recruits. But the messages are notable as US military leaders traditionally uphold an ironclad commitment to stay out of politics.
President Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow recently told me that the investigation being led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, should focus on one question: whether there was “coördination between the Russian government and people on the Trump campaign.”Sekulow went on, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” If he senses “drift” in Mueller’s investigation, he said, he will warn the special counsel’s office that it is exceeding its mandate. The issue will first be raised “informally,” he noted. But if Mueller and his team persist, Sekulow said, he might lodge a formal objection with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who has the power to dismiss Mueller and end the inquiry. President Trump has been more blunt, hinting to the Times that he might fire Mueller if the investigation looks too closely at his business dealings.
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Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump, is looking at his past deals.
Illustration by Oliver Munday; photograph by Skynesher / Getty (hands)
On a late-spring evening in Boston, just as the sun was beginning to set, a group of mathematicians lingered over the remains of the dinner they had just shared. While some cleared plates from the table, others started transforming skewers and hunks of raw potato into wobbly geodesic forms. Justin Solomon, an assistant professor at M.I.T., lunged forward to keep his structure from collapsing. “That’s five years of Pixar right there,” he joked. (Solomon worked at the animation studio before moving to academia.) He and his collaborators were unwinding after a long day making preparations for a new program at Tufts University—a summer school at which mathematicians, along with data analysts, legal scholars, schoolteachers, and political scientists, will learn to use their expertise to combat gerrymandering.
The school, which began on Monday, is the brainchild of a young Tufts professor named Moon Duchin, who specializes in geometry. It has drawn participants from France, Israel, Japan, Singapore, and forty U.S. states. Some of Duchin’s students plan to train as expert witnesses, or to run for office. One mathematician enrolled out of a Christian sense of justice; another cited the day-to-day frustrations of living in a severely gerrymandered Florida district. Yet another applicant wrote, “Until very recently, I thought doing anything about this was a hopeless cause.” At the dinner, Duchin acknowledged that she was “kind of devastated by this election,” but both she and her colleagues were careful to point out that their venture is strictly nonpartisan. It was inspired by a simple question: What if there are well-researched areas of math that could simplify, or at least systematize, the fraught process of redistricting?
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Gerrymandering has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. political system since before the very first Congress was elected.
President Trump’s relationship with the American business community suffered a major setback on Wednesday as the president was forced to shut down his major business advisory councils after corporate leaders repudiated his comments on the violence in Charlottesville this weekend.
Trump announced the disbanding of the two councils — the Strategy & Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Council, which hosted many of the top corporate leaders in America — amid a growing uproar by chief executives furious over Trump’s decision to equate the actions of white supremacists and protesters in remarks he made at Tuesday at Trump Tower.
But those groups had already decided to dissolve on their own earlier in the day, a person familiar with the process said. JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, a member of the Strategy & Policy Forum, told employees in a note on Wednesday that his group decided to disband following Trump’s news conference on Tuesday, in which he appeared to show sympathy for some of the people who marched alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville.
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President Trump, with senior adviser Jared Kushner, left, and Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier, right, meets with manufacturing chief executives at the White House in February. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Those who loved Heather Heyer, along with strangers who have already elevated her into a symbol of defiance in the face of hate, gathered Wedneday to remember the woman who was killed in the racist melee here as a born defender of justice who who died for showing up.
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up, but guess what, you just magnified her,” said Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, sparking a cheering ovation from a packed auditorium in downtown Charlottesvill. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va) were among those in the crowd.
As the political and emotional shockwaves from the weekend violence continued to roil the nation outside, Heyer’s family and friends filled the front rows, rising by turns to greive and to galvanize. Her mother beseeched those who mourn for Heyer to take up her committment to social justice
“I have aged 10 years in the last week,” Bro said as she struggled up the stairs to the stage when it was her turn to speak. But from the podium, she called forcefully to those who knew her daughter–and those around the world coming to know her now–to fight “as Heather would do.”
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Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, who was killed on Aug. 12 in Charlottesville while protesting white nationalists urged others to fight injustice and speak up. (The Washington
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Ex-CIA head: Trumps words a national disgrace
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James' World 2 