Prejudice grew in Trump supporters during his presidency, studies find

"Regardless of what we controlled for, Trump support remained a robust predictor of increases in prejudice," the paper says.

ANDREW J. NELSON / February 21, 2022

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, Jan. 29, 2022. (Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP)

(CN) — Racial and religious prejudice increased significantly among Donald Trump supporters during his presidency, according to a the results of 13 studies published Monday by the journal Nature Human Behavior.

The studies included more than 10,000 participants. The researchers, Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and Melissa J. Ferguson of Yale University, both social psychologists, also found that Trump opponents showed decreases in prejudice.

"These results suggest that Trump's presidency coincided with a substantial change in the topography of prejudice in the United States," the article says.

A scholar not involved in the study said the findings are what most social scientists would expect.

“Trump was able to be a vehicle to express ones' frustration with political correctness and tolerance," said Stephen Farnsworth, author of Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump. "He didn’t create it. These hostilities existed before him but he was a vehicle to channel that grievance."

Another scholar cautioned that prejudice had increased on both the left and the right of the political spectrum during the Trump years. And anger directed at Trump supporters could have affected their answers to the questions.

“The left didn’t want to just demonize Trump, they wanted to demonize the people who supported Trump," said Tim Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa, who like Farnsworth had not seen the studies. "If you keep calling people racist, pretty soon they are going to say, 'This is what I believe. You can say anything about me that you want.'”

The studies examined prejudice against Muslims, Black people and other groups.

"Regardless of what we controlled for, Trump support remained a robust predictor of increases in prejudice," the paper says.

What attitudes like these portend is not clear, said Farnsworth, professor and director center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. In American history, hate has sometimes been rewarded at the ballot box, but those movements come and go.

He also noted that some high-profile Republican office holders — Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Tim Scott, for example — are members of minority groups.

“It makes sense to think of American politics as something like a pendulum," he said. "One side prevails, the other side fights back. We don’t have permanent political party majorities. We don’t have permanent political party minorities. Republicans five years from now may find a libertarian message more appealing than appeals to racial identity.”

How scammers like Anna Delvey and the Tinder Swindler exploit a core feature of human nature

The Conversation
February 22, 2022

Anna Delvey (Screen Grab)

Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding.

That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s strange requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets on their credit cards, which she would then forget to pay back.

The subject of a new Netflix series, “Inventing Anna,” Sorokin, who told people her name was Anna Delvey, conned over $250,000 out of wealthy acquaintances and high-end Manhattan businesses between 2013 and 2017. It turns out her lineage was a mirage. Instead, she was an intern at a fashion magazine who came from a working-class family of Russian immigrants.

Yet the people around her were quick to accept her odd explanations, even creating excuses for her that strained credulity. The details of the Sorokin case mirror those from another recent Netflix production, “The Tinder Swindler,” which tells the story of an Israeli conman named Simon Leviev. Leviev persuaded women he met on the dating app to lend him large sums of money with similarly unbelievable claims: He was a billionaire whose enemies were trying to track him down and, for security reasons, couldn’t use his own credit cards.

How is it that so many people could have been gullible enough to buy the fantastical stories spun by Sorokin and Leviev? And why, even when “[t]he red flags were everywhere” – as one of Sorokin’s marks put it – did people continue to believe these grifters, spend their time with them and agree to lend them money?

As a social psychologist who has written a book about our surprising power of persuasion, I don’t see this as an unusual glitch of human nature. Rather, I view the stories about Sorokin and Leviev as examples of bad actors exploiting the social processes people rely on every day for efficient and effective human communication and cooperation.

To trust is to be human

Despite the belief that people are skeptics by nature, primed to shout “gotcha!” at any mistake or faux pas, this simply isn’t the case. Research shows that people tend to default to trusting others over distrusting them, believing them over doubting them and going along with someone’s self-presentation rather than embarrassing them by calling them out.

Elle Dee, a DJ whom Delvey once asked to pick up a 35,000-euro bar tab, described the ease with which people went along with Delvey’s claims: “I don’t think she even had to try that hard. Despite her utterly unsound story, people were all-too-eager to buy it.”

It still might be hard to believe that people in Sorokin’s circle would willingly hand over their money to someone they hardly knew.

Yet psychologists have watched participants hand over their money to complete strangers for many years across hundreds of experiments. In these studies, participants are told they are taking part in various types of “investment games” in which they are given the opportunity to hand over their money to another participant in the hopes of receiving a return on their investment.

What’s fascinating about these studies is that most participants are cynical about ever seeing their money again – let alone any returns on their investment – and yet they still hand it over. In other words, despite deep reservations, they still choose to trust a complete stranger.


Simon Leviev wooed women on the dating app Tinder before persuading them to give him access to cash and credit cards.
Tore Kristiansen/AFP via Getty Images

There’s something deeply human about this impulse. Humans are social creatures, and trusting one another is baked into our DNA. As psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues have pointed out, without trust it is hard to imagine endeavors like Airbnb, car shares or a working democracy having any success.

Lies are the exception, not the norm

Of course, Sorokin’s requests were often accompanied by elaborate explanations and justifications, and you might wonder why so few people seemed to doubt the veracity of her claims. Yet just as trust is a default of human interaction, a presumption of sincerity is a default expectation of basic communication.

This maxim of communication was first proposed by Paul Grice, an influential philosopher of language. Grice argued that communication is a cooperative endeavor. Understanding one another requires working together. And to do that, there must be some ground rules, one of which is that both parties are telling the truth.

Sorokin – then known to her acquaintances as ‘Anna Delvey’ – appears, far right, at a fashion award ceremony in New York City in 2014.
Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images

In an era of “truthiness” and “fake news,” such a premise may seem absurd and naϊve. But people lie far less than you might think; in fact, if the default assumption were that the person you were talking to was lying, communication would be nearly impossible. If I challenged you on whether you read every book you claimed to have read, or whether the steak you had last night was really overcooked, we’d never get anywhere.

Researchers have found experimental evidence for what is sometimes called the “truth default.” In one series of studies, researchers asked participants to evaluate whether statements were true or false. Sometimes the participants were interrupted so they couldn’t fully process the statements. This allowed the researchers to get at people’s default assumption: When in doubt, would they default to belief or disbelief?

It turns out that when participants weren’t able to fully process statements, they tended to simply assume they were true.

A reluctance to accuse

Even if Sorokin’s marks were to doubt her story, it’s unlikely that they would have called her out on it.

The sociologist Erving Goffman’s classic theory of “facework” argues that it is as uncomfortable for us to call someone else out – to suggest they aren’t who they are presenting themselves to be – as it is to be the person called out. Even when people see someone doing something they disagree with, they’re loath to say anything.

Other studies have explored this phenomenon. One found that people hesitate to call others out for using racist language they disagree with or for sexual harassment.

As much as you’d like to believe that if you were in the shoes of Sorokin’s and Leviev’s targets you would have been emboldened to blow the lid off the whole charade, chances are that rather than make things uncomfortable for everyone, you’d simply go along with it.

The tendency to trust, believe and go along with other people’s explanations of events may seem disadvantageous. And it’s true, these inclinations can expose people. But without trust, there is no cooperation; without assuming others are telling the truth, there is no communication; and without accepting people for what they present to the world, there is no foundation on which to build a relationship.

In other words, the very features that look like glitches when exploited are in fact the very essence of what it means to be human.

Vanessa Bohns, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Here’s the truth about rising inflation — and it has nothing to do with spending

Noah Berlatsky
February 21, 2022

Calculator (Shutterstock)

Inflation numbers for December indicate rising prices continue to be a major problem. The Personal Consumption Index, which the Fed uses to gauge inflation, was up 5.8 percent for the year that ended in December, a slight increase from 5.7 percent in the year before.

That’s the fastest price increase in 40 years. Wages and salaries in the fourth quarter increased 4.5 percent, which is robust — but not enough to keep up with inflation.

Republicans have responded to rising inflation by calling for a reduction in spending. They’ve been joined by conservative Democrats like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. All of them argue that government efforts to fight the pandemic have flooded the economy with dollars, and that this has caused price increases.

The more likely cause of inflation is the pandemic itself. Curtailing government efforts to battle covid are just going to make inflation worse.

Prices go up when there is more demand than supply. Covid has created enormous blockages in the global supply chain. Production fell sharply in many industries during the pandemic as lockdowns and fears of contagion closed workplaces. Semiconductor production has been slow to rebound, which has boosted car prices. Oil production was also hit hard. The Bureau of Labor statistics reports that about half of total inflation is the result of increases in gas and automotive prices.

Food and grocery prices have been hit hard by inflation for many of the same reasons. It’s hard to produce a steady supply of anything during a massive pandemic when workers are falling sick or have to stay home to care for sick family members.

In one week in January, US pork production dropped 8 percent because of staffing shortages. Distributors have cut orders to some grocery stores by 20 to 40 percent. Shortages mean there is less supply, less supply means higher prices.

If inflation was caused by US policy choices, you’d expect it to be confined to the US. But supply chain issues are global. So are rising prices.

Inflation in the EU rose to a record 5.1 percent in January. Inflation in the UK hit a 30-year high. China has done better in keeping inflation under control — and, not coincidentally, it has also put in place strong lockdown policies which have (at least so far) largely prevented the out-of-control omicron spread in other areas of the world.

The Fed is likely to raise interest rates throughout the year to try to control inflation. But if the major cause of inflation is the pandemic, the solution at some point has to be ending the pandemic, or at least bringing it under control.

Many experts hope that omicron will burn itself out in the next weeks. At that point so many people will have been infected that the general level of immunity in the population will be boosted, and we can hope for a less plague-blighted 2022.

If that’s the case, supply-chain issues should resolve themselves, and inflation should come under control on its own.

The problem with the future, though, is that it’s difficult to predict.

As we’ve seen, new variants can present new, unexpected, and devastating challenges. People who have had covid do not have perfect immunity to reinfection. What immunity they have can fade over time.

Omicron may linger longer than experts anticipate. New waves could hit. The uncertainty in itself can create production shortfalls as producers and workers hedge their bets against possible crises.

If we want to defeat inflation, long term, during covid, there’s no substitute for a robust public health response.

The Biden Administration has slowly started to mail free covid tests through dedicated website orders. It plans to buy and distribute 1 billion rapid tests by mid-February.

That effort needs to continue and expand, even if covid temporarily dies down. In the middle of an ongoing pandemic, everyone should have as close-to-instant access to free testing as possible, all the time.

The same goes for masks.

Biden is distributing 400 million N95 masks, but that should be the beginning. High quality masks should be available for free in every school, grocery store and library in the country, at the very least.

Biden needs to do better in encouraging vaccine uptake as well, especially as more boosters become available and necessary. Right now only 41.8 percent of the population has received booster shots, according to the CDC. Omicron showed just how inadequate that is.

It’s true that there are hard-core partisan rightwing anti-vaxxers who will always refuse vaccines (and masks and testing for that matter.)

But they are outnumbered by people who are willing to get the vaccines, but are unsure how to navigate appointment websites, or can’t get time off work, or can’t get transportation, or aren’t aware that the vaccines are free (an understandable confusion given our generally unaffordable health care system).

Mandating paid time off for people who need to get vaccines, or even paying them directly, could help. So could more vaccines at places like libraries, where people expect to receive free services.

Ongoing, expanded vaccination, mask and testing campaigns all cost money. They all also would be greatly helped by bipartisan buy-in.

Unfortunately, Republicans and even many centrist pundits have turned against even mild pandemic abatement measures, like temporary remote learning at the height of the pandemic. Many seem to believe that if they shout “back to normal!” loud enough, normality will pour across the land.

That’s not how anything works.

If we don’t defeat covid, we can’t get back to normal. Defeating covid requires investing in public health. If the Republicans get their way, though, we will spend nothing and make no effort to mitigate covid.

That means we will continue to have major, dangerous pandemic outbreaks, workers will become sick, production will stall and inflation will remain a live and volatile problem.

The politics here are difficult, to say the least.

We need to spend more to fight the pandemic and reduce inflation, but inflation gives reactionaries an excuse to fight all spending.

Biden has no choice though. If Democrats don’t get inflation under control, they face major losses in 2022 and 2024. Defeating covid is a moral, economic and electoral imperative.

I'm an evangelical minister: 

Christian nationalism is a bizarre, misogynist fantasy — and totally un-Christian

Nathaniel Manderson, Salon
February 21, 2022

Despite having a devoutly Christian prime minister, the role of the Christian right in Australia has waned in recent years. Mick Tsikas/AAP

During my time as a boy attending an evangelical church and then later, when I attended an evangelical seminary, it was hard not to notice an underlying misogyny that seemed consistently present. As a man, I would be the head of the household. I was like Christ to my future wife. In fact, I once heard a sermon by prominent evangelical minister Tony Evans where he declared that wives must refer to their husbands as "Lord." In my church youth groups, we were separated by sex and the boys had bizarre discussions on the type of men we should become. There was a strong emphasis on being what they considered to be manly and tough, whereas young girls, of course, were encouraged to be nurturing, submissive and, most important, sexually pure.

When contemporary evangelical leaders push a message around Christian nationalism, I can promise you it always refers back to a time when the "traditional" roles of American households held fast. Making America "great again" is truly about bringing back a time when women were subject to their husbands' wills and whims, and the husbands were lords of the house.

Someone recently wrote to me, in response to one of my previous articles, wondering why so many evangelicals chose Donald Trump, a vulgar misogynist who shows no understanding of any element of the Christian faith, over other candidates who were much closer to the evangelical movement. The difficult answer is that most evangelical men long for the days when misogyny was cool, when women were under the thumb of their husbands and sexual harassment was almost universally accepted. Trump exemplified that approach — and a great many evangelicals loved him for it. Trump remains the favorite of the evangelicals not because any commitment to Christ or the Christian way of life — since he has none — but because of the widespread desire among evangelicals to take back control over their lives, and their wives. One of the major ways this has been expressed lately is through the ideology known as Christian nationalism.

As I understand it, Christian nationalism is an idea now widely accepted within the evangelical church that the U.S. is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles — no matter what it may say in the Constitution. This commitment to the Christian faith, as a nation, is the reason God blessed the U.S. as the greatest nation that ever existed. God will only continue to bless this nation, however, as long as it remains a Christian nation. As America becomes more progressive and increasingly secular in terms of politics, culture and faith, then in this view God will remove his blessing and protection and great evils will befall our nation.

This remarkable theory has no connection to any of the teachings of Jesus Christ or his followers, and is completely irrelevant to the Christian faith. I will certainly admit that I have a heart for American idealism. I have officiated at numerous Veterans Day and Memorial Day services, and I have felt the love of country enormously, on those days and all the days in between. None of that, however, has anything to do with Christianity. God does not play favorites when it comes to nations, people or cultures. That entire idea is morally and theologically absurd.

In truth, Christian nationalism is based not in the Bible or the teachings of Jesus Christ, but on the idea of the traditional American family. As roles for women have changed, as divorce becomes more common, as same-sex marriage gains a firmer footing, and now with the movement for transgender rights and visibility becoming more public, the panic of the Christian nationalists becomes ever more desperate. This is where all that rage among evangelicals is coming from. Understand, most people are motivated politically based on how they perceive policy decisions affecting their day-to-day life. Nothing affects our lives more than what is happening to our families. When things fall apart at home, it can feel helpful — even if it's not healthy — to blame someone or something besides ourselves. For myself, I know that all my personal failures are mine alone. I can't blame MTV or Eminem or the LGBTQI population, the evangelical church, Trump, Biden, Obama, my mom, my dad or anyone else. The problem is in the mirror, as it is for everyone. Any effort to pass that blame along to others is quite human, and quite wrong.

My final point on Christian nationalism is around all the macho tough-guy stuff that seems to be on the lips of every right-wing leader. Being "tough" seems to be the only thing conservative commentators and evangelical leaders care about. Trump is supposedly the epitome of that and his little posse loves him for it. I won't pretend to understand it. After I graduated middle school, being tough just didn't seem that important. But for people like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jerry Falwell Jr. (before his fall) and of course Trump himself, it's important to keep pretending that they are a bunch of tough guys, even though they also claim to stand with Jesus Christ, a humble, meek and homeless teacher.

I'm no tough guy but I am happy to offer a challenge to any of these fake tough guys. Debate me anywhere, anytime. I am truly blue-collar, a member of the American working class. I am a Bible-believing minister and a flaming liberal. I believe that the Christian nationalist message comes from the devil himself. I am trying to save the name of the Christian faith and to stand up for American idealism. I oppose every part of the hypocritical, fake-populist agenda of the Christian nationalists and their enablers. I double-dog dare any of them, here and now, to stand up and take me on in public debate. Odds are they never will.

ARYAN CHAUVINISM

White men as victims: America's most dangerous fantasy

Chauncey Devega, Salon
February 22, 2022

By Gage Skidmore -


One of the most popular lies being circulated by the Republican Party and the larger white right is that white men are somehow oppressed in America. To say that such a claim is absurd would be an understatement. To be white is to have access to unearned advantages in almost every arena of American society and throughout the world. And to be male is also to have access to resources and life opportunities that in general are de facto still denied to women and girls.

By almost all indicators, men as a group dominate and control America's networks of power, influence, wealth and other resources.

Of course many individual men who happen to be white experience life hardships and other disadvantages. Moreover, the group advantages enjoyed by men overall do not trickle down equally to all men on either side of the color line. Likewise, there are individual Black and brown people, and individual women, who have tremendous power, resources and wealth. But in the aggregate, on a societal scale, white men are not being disadvantaged because of their race or gender.

But the absurdity of this claim should not be surprising. Race itself is perhaps the greatest absurdity in modern history; it is a social construct, not a genetic or biological fact. It was invented to legitimize global white supremacy and imperialism.

As Peter Prontzos at Scientific American summarizes:

In 2014, more than 130 leading population geneticists condemned the idea that genetic differences account for the economic, political, social and behavioral diversity around the world. In fact, said a 2018 article in Scientific American, there is a "broad scientific consensus that when it comes to genes there is just as much diversity within racial and ethnic groups as there is across them." And the Human Genome Project has confirmed that the genomes found around the globe are 99.9 percent identical in every person. Hence, the very idea of different "races" is nonsense.
A second problem, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff has shown, is that simply using the word "race," even when criticizing racism, actually reinforces the false belief that human beings belong to fundamentally different groups. That's because the more a word is used, the more that certain brain circuits are activated and the stronger that metaphor becomes.

Nonetheless the "true lie" of race remains one of the most powerful forces in American and global society.

A binary understanding of gender — which itself is also a social construct — is only slightly less absurd than the race concept. When race and gender are combined with questions of whiteness, masculinity and power, matters only become more complicated, more confusing and therefore more politically and socially combustible.

Ultimately, white male victimology has historically proven itself to pose an extreme threat to pluralistic democracy. When the group with the most power believes in delusions and fantasies about its oppression, violence is the likely result. This is justified through claims of self-defense against an imaginary threat.

In a recent featured essay at the Washington Post, Cleve Wootson Jr. waded into the tumultuous debate about white male victimology and "oppression" in the Age of Trump and beyond. He begins with:

Holding court at a political rally in Texas last week, former president Donald Trump implied that he — a wealthy White man who was elected to an office almost exclusively held by White men — was a victim of racism.
His claim referenced what he said were three "radical vicious, racist prosecutors" — one in Georgia, one in New York, one in Washington, and all of them Black — who are investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and examining his business organization's finances. But his comments made him the latest in a line of conservatives claiming, loudly and frequently, that White men are victims of racism.
After years of being branded a racist for his inflammatory comments and actions, Trump and some of his allies are attempting to turn that label back on their critics. In the process, they have wielded their own definition of racism, one that disregards the country's history of racial exclusion that gives White people a monopoly on power and wealth. To make America more equitable, they argue, everyone must be treated equally and, therefore, White men must not in any way be disadvantaged.

Wootson locates this narrative of victimology within the larger context of Joe Biden's promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court:

The decision to consider only Black women was deemed racist by many conservatives. For some, anything but a race-blind selection would reek of bias, and Biden's parameters have been characterized as a political ploy to mollify a key constituency. Others have noted that narrowing the choices to Black women also excludes other historically disadvantaged groups, such as Hispanic women or women of Asian descent.

Wootson also triangulates these white male victimology narratives relative to the extreme partisan polarization of our era, in which a large majority of Republicans believe that "little or nothing needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans," according to a Pew Research study conducted last year, while a similarly large majority of Democrats believe "a lot more needs to be done to achieve racial equity."

For some White voters, experts say, efforts to give certain groups added help can be seen as unnecessarily onerous and even discriminatory. Such views are often deeply held and affect how people — and voting blocs — feel about any number of issues, such as whether children study racial equity in school, who should receive food stamps, or whether an implicit bias seminar at work is a waste of time.

To gain more context and insight into how the Republican Party and the larger white right are deploying the fantastical narrative of white men as an oppressed and persecuted group, I asked several experts on race, power and society for their thoughts on white male backlash, its origins and implications.

Jessie Daniels is a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. She is the author of several books including "White Lies" and "Cyber Racism." Her new book is "Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It."

There's a long history of white men seeing themselves as the chief victims of racial oppression. This includes the end of slavery. White men who were also enslavers saw themselves as the true victims of the abolition of their way of making a living, so they went to their government and asked, even demanded, compensation for their "loss" in freeing the people who worked for them for no money. In Britain, this was enacted through the Slave Compensation Act 1837 and continued compensating slave-owning white families through 2015. In the U.S., each slave-owning white man received $300 for each person they owned who was freed because of the Emancipation Proclamation, when at the same time formerly enslaved people were promised 40 acres and a mule, a promise that was mostly unfulfilled.

Fast forward to the era of "affirmative action" in the early 1970s, and even with this very limited federal government program, white men felt attacked.

My research into the far right led me to the printed publications of groups on the right — from the KKK to David Duke's NAAWP — from around 1970 through the early 1990s. Throughout the publications that I examined, I found white men deeply invested in the sort of twin imagery of themselves as "warriors" and also as "victims" of racial oppression.

In the current era, examples proliferate of white men who see themselves as victims, chief among them former President Trump, who in his opening campaign speech referenced the "rapists" and "drug dealers" coming from Mexico, an old racist trope from the white supremacist playbook. It's also deadly. White men as "victims" easily slides into a white guy with a gun. And there's often a white woman standing by her man on the front porch of their midwestern palazzo, even with the guns.

The "victim" rhetoric from white men coincides with the white-led backlash against any kind of Black progress. A year after the supposed "reckoning" of the summer of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd (and "Central Park Karen"), it's not surprising to me that we are experiencing a season of whitelash with white men at the front, proclaiming their innocence for the destruction they've caused even as they profess their victimhood.

Wajahat Ali is the author of the new book "Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American." He is a contributing writer for the Daily Beast. His essays and other writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and the Atlantic.

White male grievance is the lifeblood of white supremacy, an endless supply of faux victimhood to justify all sorts of irrational brutality and inequity to maintain power for them and only them. Trump has just tapped into this white rage to fuel the right wing movement; this is nothing new. Just go back and see the movie "Birth of a Nation" from 1915 — it's all there. Black emancipation, even barely at that, was an affront to white power, rule and dominion. As a result? They were victims who then donned the hoods of the KKK to reclaim their honor. Victims or heroes, never the villains.

Jean Guerrero is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of the recent book "Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda." Her essays and other writing have been featured at Vanity Fair, Politico, the Nation, Wired, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

White victimology politics were once the purview of neo-Nazis and the KKK, but they've become the engine of the Republican Party. Back in the '70s, David Duke was largely reviled and rejected by Americans for his white victimology politics. He claimed the "white man" was the real "second-class citizen" in America today.

But this delusion that white men are the real victims is now mainstream gospel among Republicans. That's thanks to decades of conservative politicians and talk show hosts cashing in on white racial anxieties about demographic change by injecting white supremacy or "white supremacy lite" into the GOP bloodstream.

Many of those key players (i.e., Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller) have roots in California, where non-Hispanic white people became a demographic minority in the '90s.

As I wrote in "Hatemonger," that's when we saw the rise of a racially furious, radicalized brand of conservatism that eventually morphed into Trumpism. It's no surprise that Trump is now repeatedly framing white men as victims of racial discrimination, given that his trusted ally Miller has for months been busy thwarting efforts to help marginalized communities by casting those efforts as racist against white people. White victimology politics are rooted in the fallacy of civilization as a zero-sum game. Their logical conclusion is race war.

Ashley Jardina in an assistant professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the author of "White Identity Politics."

Central to Trump's political strategy was an effort to stoke racial grievances among white Americans.

Feelings of racial victimization among white Republicans grew over Trump's presidency. According to data from the American National Election Study, in 2016, 30% of white men identifying with the Republican Party reported that whites experience a moderate to a great amount of discrimination in the U.S. By 2020, that number had increased to 40%. But white Republican women also share this sense of racial victimhood. In 2020, nearly 43% of white Republican women surveyed said that white Americans experience notable amounts of racial discrimination.

Joe R. Feagin is a sociologist and the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. He is the author of many books including "The White Racial Frame," "White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics," "Racist America" and "Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage."

Prominent white men, including major white scholars, created and circulated the terms "reverse racism" and "affirmative discrimination" starting back in the late 1960s and 1970s solely to counter the new civil rights laws and presidential affirmative action orders (from Lyndon Johnson) pressuring whites in major organizations to redress centuries of extreme racial oppression and of white unjust enrichments from that oppression, enrichments passed along many generations of white families to the present day.

In the late 1960s and 1970s this federal pressure sought to redress the severe oppressive legacies of Jim Crow segregation. For decades this reverse racism/white victimology notion has been a standard white deflection tactic to change the necessary antiracist discussions and actions away from those about seriously remedying those past and present unjust white enrichments from 400-plus years of white racist oppression, exploitation and dominance. It is basically an attack on Black America and Black efforts for change.

Especially relevant to this current white victimology is the reality that this broad white racial framing has always centered a very positive orientation to whites as highly virtuous and a negative orientation to racial "others" viewed as unvirtuous.

These narratives aggressively accentuate notions of white superiority, white civilization and institutions, white virtue and white moral goodness. That is what all these white politicians are doing with their phony and empirically undocumented claims that they are victims of racial discrimination. Their white virtuousness is being legitimately challenged, and their unvirtuousness in creating and maintaining racist institutions is being foregrounded.

DC insider: Political extremism is a one-sided affair
Robert Reich
February 20, 2022
www.rawstory.com

How did we get so politically divided? Well, it’s not because both sides have gotten more extreme.

I got my start in American politics 50 years ago. My political views then — to grossly simplify them — were that I was against the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex, strongly supportive of civil and voting rights, and against the power of big corporations. That put me here: just left of the center.

Back then, the political spectrum from left to right was short. The biggest political issue was the Vietnam War. The left was demonstrating against it, sometimes violently. Since I was committed to ending the war through peaceful political means, I volunteered for George McGovern, the anti-war presidential candidate. Even Richard Nixon on the right was starting to look for ways out of Vietnam.

Twenty-five years later, I was in Bill Clinton’s cabinet, and the left-to-right political spectrum stretched much longer. The biggest change was how much further right the right had moved. Ronald Reagan had opened the political floodgates to corporate and Wall Street money — bankrolling right-wing candidates and messages that decried “big government.”

Bill Clinton sought to lead from the “center,” but by then the “center” had moved so far right that Clinton gutted public assistance, enacted “tough on crime” policies that unjustly burdened the poor and people of color, and deregulated Wall Street. All of which put me further to the left of the center — although my political views had barely changed.

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Today, the spectrum from left to right is the longest it’s been in my 50 years in and around politics. The left hasn’t moved much at all. We’re still against the war machine, still pushing for civil and voting rights, still fighting the power of big corporations. But the right has moved far, far rightward.

Donald Trump brought America about as close as we’ve ever come to fascism. He incited an attempted coup against the United States. He and most of the Republican Party continue to deny that he lost the 2020 election. And they’re getting ready to suppress votes and disregard election outcomes they disagree with.

So don’t believe the fear-mongering that today’s left is “radical.” What’s really radical is the right’s move toward fascism.

Robert Reich writes at robertreich.substack.com. His latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It." He is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.

How 'twisted' and 'warped' MAGA Republicans fear Justin Trudeau more than Vladimir Putin

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
February 22, 2022

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that the proposed US levies would cause significant pain on both sides of the border AFP/File / PUNIT PARANJPE

At a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin appears likely to invade Ukraine, many right-wing media outlets — from Fox News to the Daily Wire to Breitbart News — are vigorously defending Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán while arguing that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the real authoritarian. Trudeau’s unforgivable sin, according to the MAGA far right, is enforcing vaccine and testing requirements for people entering Canada from the United States.

Conservative Daily Beast opinion writer and Never Trumper Matt Lewis, in a February 22 column, compares the MAGA movement’s views on Trudeau versus Putin — arguing that the American right has truly gone off the deep end when it considers Trudeau the enemy but defends Putin.

“If you want to understand someone’s values or worldview,” Lewis writes, “take a look at who and what provokes outrage and who and what evokes sympathy. The cognitive dissonance inherent in much of the American right can make such an examination problematic. That’s because some of the most prominent voices on the right today view Vladimir Putin as a misunderstood victim. Meanwhile, they cast Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an authoritarian strongman.”

Lewis goes on to offer specific examples, noting that the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens tweeted, “STOP talking about Russia. Send American troops to Canada to deal with the tyrannical reign of Justin Trudeau Castro.”

The Never Trumper adds, “Or consider Fox News host Tucker Carlson, my friend — though we disagree profoundly on politics — and former boss. Carlson isn’t outraged over what is happening to Ukraine, but found time last week to bash ‘strongman’ Trudeau as ‘the dictator of Canada,’ while saying that ‘Canada canceled democracy.’ There’s also Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says Trudeau has gone ‘full dictator.’ And J.D. Vance, celebrated author and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, who recently declared that he ‘doesn’t really care what happens to Ukraine.’”



Lewis injects some humor into his column, noting that Marty McFly — the time-traveling Reagan-era teenager Michael J. Fox portrayed in the 1985 fantasy film “Back to the Future” — would be shocked to see so many Republicans fawning over a former KGB agent. Indeed, back in the days of Madonna, Run-D.M.C. and Duran Duran, Reagan Republicans railed against the Kremlin nonstop; now, MAGA Republicans consider Putin and his ally Orbán people to be admired.



“If the 1985 version of Marty McFly transported to 2022,” Lewis writes, “it would be impossible to explain to him why so many conservative Republicans are willing to look the other way on Russia invading a sovereign nation, while they simultaneously blast Canada for imposing consequences on protesters blocking traffic…. To be clear, Putin is a former KGB agent and an actual authoritarian. He literally kills and imprisons his critics. And don’t forget the little matter of 100,000 of his troops massed on the Ukrainian border.”

Lewis adds, “Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau is the elected leader of a free nation. He took action to restore law and order after three weeks of truckers blocking traffic and generally disturbing the peace.”

The conservative Lewis has spent plenty of time bashing the left, but he has been a blistering critic of former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. And he wraps up his February 22 column by stressing that MAGA Republicans are as “warped” now as they were when Trump was still in the White House.

“If you find someone willing to defend Vladimir Putin for threatening to invade and kill his neighbors, while simultaneously calling Justin Trudeau a ‘dictator’ for shutting down a lawless protest after three weeks, you have found someone who either is intellectually dishonest or has a warped sense of reality,” Lewis warns. “If you thought the gaslighting would end with Trump, you were wrong. The American right is getting in the habit of calling evil good and good evil. It’s a truly twisted and perverse perception of a dangerous world, and the scary thing is, it’s catching on.”

 

Sea level rise is now a climate crisis

Scientists have said the latest research by the US National Ocean Service’s on the future rise in sea levels must be seen as a call for urgent action as coastal communities across the world are under serious threat.

The NOS an office within the US Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has warned the United States is expected to experience as much sea level rise by the year 2050 as it witnessed in the previous hundred years. The Sea Level Rise Technical Report provides the most up-to-date sea level rise projections for all U.S. states and territories by decade for the next 100 years and beyond.

The report found that the sea level rise expected by 2050 will create a profound increase in the frequency of coastal flooding, even in the absence of storms or heavy rainfall.

“By 2050, moderate flooding ⁠— which is typically disruptive and damaging by today’s weather, sea level and infrastructure standards ⁠— is expected to occur more than 10 times as often as it does today,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, NOAA national ocean service director. “These numbers mean a change from a single event every 2-5 years to multiple events each year, in some places.”

“For businesses along the coast, knowing what to expect and how to plan for the future is critical,” said US Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo. “These updated projections will help businesses, and the communities they support, understand risks and make smart investments in the years ahead.”

“This new data on sea rise is the latest reconfirmation that our climate crisis ⁠— as the President has said ⁠— is blinking ‘code red,’” added Gina McCarthy, National Climate Advisor. “We must redouble our efforts to cut the greenhouse gases that cause climate change while, at the same time, help our coastal communities become more resilient in the face of rising seas.”

In the UK leading scientists have joined the call for action warning that the UK and beyond will suffer a similar threat to the United States as sea levels rise.

Dr Vikki Thompson, Senior Research Associate at the School of Geographical Sciences and Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol, said: “As the report from USA finds, in the UK we are likely to experience as much sea level rise as occurred in the last century in the next 30 years, and this will lead to an increase in coastal flooding.

“Over the past century sea level around the UK has risen, and this trend will continue over future centuries. Around the UK by 2100 the average sea level rise is projected to be about half a metre. Although all regions will experience sea level rise some regions show a slower change than others. In areas of central Scotland which were covered by glaciers in the last ice age, the land is rebounding now the ice is no longer pressing down – causing less sea level rise. The future is not set – reducing emissions will reduce sea level rise.”

Dr Ella Gilbert, Post-doctoral research assistant in the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, said:

“Globally, sea level rise has picked up the pace in recent years, rising 25 cm since 1900 – with 10 cm of that since 1993,” explained Dr Ella Gilbert, post-doctoral research assistant in the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading. “This report shows that US sea level rise is expected to accelerate further as the climate warms due to the effects of glacier melt, the expansion of the ocean as it warms, and – in some places – the sinking of land.

“Just like in the US examples given in this report, sea level rise will affect different parts of UK coastlines differently, with seas rising more in the Southeast of England than in Scotland. Higher water levels mean greater risks of flooding, coastal erosion and storm damage, with attendant consequences for property, infrastructure, and lives.

“Urgent action is required to avoid worsening the future risks and to adapt to the changes that are already baked in.”

Professor Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London, warned the impact will be profound.

“This new report is so important in telling us what we must do to be ready as sea-level rise becomes more evident,” he explained. “The changes are slow and incremental, but after decades would become devastating without proper action. We must start now, immediately acting and planning for the next century to ensure that we can experience these changes without catastrophe.”

“By 2050, moderate flooding ⁠— which is typically disruptive and damaging by today’s weather, sea level and infrastructure standards ⁠— is expected to occur more than 10 times as often as it does today.”

Nicole LeBoeuf, NOAA

Follow us on twitter: @risksEmerging

Why Storm Eunice is so severe – and will violent wind storms become more common?

The Conversation
February 19, 2022

Storm Eunice leaves deadly trail across northern Europe

The UK Met Office has issued two red weather warnings in as many months for strong winds. These are the highest threat levels meteorologists can announce, and are the first wind-only red warnings to be issued since 2016’s Storm Gertrude.

So what’s behind the UK’s recent spate of dangerous wind storms? And are these events likely to become more common in future?

Storm Arwen in late November 2021 caused devastation across Scotland, northern England and parts of Wales. Winds of 100mph killed three people, ripped up trees, and left 9,000 people without power for over a week in freezing temperatures.

The destruction caused by Arwen is still apparent in some areas, and the clean-up from Storm Dudley – which battered eastern England on Wednesday February 16 – is underway at the time of writing.

Now the UK faces Storm Eunice, and its gusts of up to 122 miles per hour. Eunice bears a striking similarity to the “Great Storm” of 1987, which unleashed hurricane-force winds and claimed 22 lives across Britain and France in October of that year. Both are predicted to contain a “sting jet”: a small, narrow airstream that can form inside a storm and produce intense winds over an area smaller than 100 km.

Sting jets, which were first discovered in 2003, and likely occurred during the Great Storm and Storm Arwen, can last anywhere between one and 12 hours. They are difficult to forecast and relatively rare, but make storms more dangerous.

Sting jets occur in a certain type of extratropical cyclone – a rotating wind system that forms outside of the tropics. These airstreams form around 5km above the Earth’s surface then descend on the southwest side of a cyclone, close to its centre, accelerating as they do and bringing fast-moving air from high in the atmosphere with them. When they form, they can produce much higher wind speeds on the ground than might otherwise be forecast by studying pressure gradients in the storm’s core alone.

Meteorologists are still working to understand sting jets, but they are likely to have a significant influence on the UK’s weather in a warming climate.

Windier winters ahead?

In 1987, the models used for weather forecasts were incapable of representing sting jets, but improvements mean that forecasters predicted Storm Eunice before it had even begun to form in the Atlantic.

Over the past decade, our team at Newcastle University has worked closely with colleagues at the UK Met Office to develop new high-resolution climate models that can simulate sting jets, as well as hail and lightning, to illuminate how extreme weather events might change in a warming climate.

We already know that, as the world warms, downpours are intensifying. The simple reason is that warmer air can hold more moisture. The UK saw the wettest day on record in 2020, already estimated to be 2.5 times more likely because of greenhouse gas emissions.

Our research team’s new high-resolution climate models predict bigger increases in winter rainfall than standard global climate models due to a large increase in rainfall from thunderstorms during winter.

We are less certain about how the pattern of extreme wind storms, like Eunice, will change, as the relevant processes are much more complicated. The UK’s recent cluster of winter wind storms is related to a particularly strong polar vortex creating low pressure in the Arctic, and a faster jet stream – a core of very strong wind high in the atmosphere that can extend across the Atlantic – bringing stormier and very wet weather to the UK.

A stronger jet stream makes storms more powerful and its orientation roughly determines the track of the storm and where it affects. Some aspects of climate change strengthen the jet stream, leading to more UK wind storms. Other aspects, like the higher rate of warming over the poles compared with the equator, may weaken it and the westerly flow of wind towards the UK.

Our high-resolution models predict more intense wind storms over the UK as climate change accelerates, with much of this increase coming from storms that develop sting jets.

Projections from global climate models are uncertain and suggest only small increases in the number of extreme cyclones. But these models fail to represent sting jets and poorly simulate the processes that cause storms to build. As a result, these models probably underestimate future changes in storm intensity.

We think that using high-resolution climate models, which can represent important processes like sting jets, alongside information from global models on how large-scale conditions might change, could give a more accurate picture. But the UK isn’t doing enough to prepare for the increasingly severe extreme weather already predicted.

Humanity has a choice in how much warmer the world gets based on the rate at which we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While more research will confirm if more extreme wind storms will hit the UK in the future, we are certain that winter storms will produce stronger downpours and more rain and flooding when they do occur.


Hayley J. Fowler, Professor of Climate Change Impacts, Newcastle University and Colin Manning, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Climate Science, Newcastle University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

European storms: 14 dead, highest winds ever recorded in England

Waves crash against the shore at Doolin in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, Sunday, Feb. 20, 2022. (Niall Carson/PA via AP)

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 
PUBLISHED: February 21, 2022

LONDON (AP) — Northern Europe was battered by the third major storm in five days, with heavy rains and high winds on Sunday and Monday killing at least two more people, disrupting travel and prompting hundreds of flood alerts across a region still recovering from last week’s hurricane-force winds.

Storm Franklin pushed in from the North Atlantic on Sunday afternoon even as crews worked to clear fallen trees and restore power to thousands of customers hit by storms Dudley and Eunice last week.

Heavy rains and high winds swept across Northern Ireland and northern England before moving on to France. England’s environment agency issued more than 300 flood warnings and alerts, and train operators urged people not to travel.

In France, a couple in their 70s died Sunday after their car was swept into the English Channel near a small town in Normandy. The couple had called for help but it did not reach them in time.


“With the wind, the car skidded,” Herve Bougon, mayor of Bricqueville-Sur-Mer, told the Ouest-France newspaper. “It was pushed onto its side as it sank into the water.”

At least 14 people have died across Europe during a week of wild weather that meteorologists say is being fueled by an unusually strong jet stream over the North Atlantic. The storms have left hundreds of thousands of people without power and triggered local flooding and evacuations as high winds ripped the roofs off buildings.

Gusts of up to 87 mph were recorded late Sunday on the Isle of Wight on Sunday after the U.K.’s weather service warned that Storm Franklin would produce widespread winds of 60 mph to 70 mph. A gust of 122 mph, provisionally the highest ever recorded in England, was measured Friday on the Isle of Wight as Storm Eunice hit the region. Hurricane-level winds start at 74 mph.

In Germany, the latest storm was less severe than its immediate predecessors, but it still brought down trees and ripped the roof off a house in Herdecke, near Dortmund. Two drivers drove into a fallen tree in Belm, in northern Germany, and were taken to the hospital.

Official weather warnings in Germany, where the latest storm is known as Antonia, were lifted on Monday, though disruption to transport continued in northern parts of the country.

Insurance broker Aon estimated the insured damage in Germany from the successive storms at 1.6 billion euros ($1.8 billion). The Dutch insurers’ association estimated that the three storms caused at least 500 million euros ($567 million) of damage across the Netherlands.

Despite preparations and warning by weather authorities, “the February storms have sparked a record number of claims and an enormous damages bill,” said Richard Weurding, general director of the Dutch Association of Insurers.

The storms blew roofs off buildings and uprooted trees across the Netherlands, killing four people on Friday as Eunice lashed the country. Insurers warned that more damage could still be to come with strong winds forecast in coming days.

In Denmark, the storm uprooted trees and disrupted rail services in and around Copenhagen, the capital. Sweden saw heavy snowfall that shut down buses in its capital city of Stockholm.