An ‘imposter Christianity’ is threatening American democracy

… Videos from the January 6 attack show a chaotic, tear-gas-soaked scene at the Capitol that looked more like a medieval battle. Insurrectionists punched police officers, used flagpoles as spears and smashed officers’ faces against doors while a mob chanted, “Fight for Trump!” The attack left five people dead and […] Read more »

Are Latinos Really Realigning Toward Republicans?

Once the backbone of the Democratic base, working-class white voters have been migrating toward the Republican Party since the 1960s, largely out of alienation from the Democrats’ liberal stands on cultural and racial issues. Half a century later, those working-class white voters—usually defined as having less than a four-year college […] Read more »

A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted the Jan. 6 attack

The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in full swing. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was seeing Soviet spies in every corner of the government. And a young sociologist at Columbia University, Daniel Bell, convened a seminar to come to grips with the menace of McCarthyism. Bell enlisted an […] Read more »

No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

Ann Coulter, in so many words, thinks that I am responsible for the mass shooting in Buffalo in mid-May. Not me alone. After the shooting, Coulter wrote a column dismissing the idea that Republican politicians and commentators had popularized the “Great Replacement” theory, a conspiracy theory that the young, white […] Read more »

Christian nationalism on the rise in some GOP campaigns

… Christian nationalism is emerging alongside and in some cases overlapping with other right-wing movements, such as the conspiratorial QAnon, white supremacy, and denialism over COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Christian prayers and symbols featured prominently in and around the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection there. … […] Read more »

New data shows how ‘great replacement’ overlaps with other racial fears

The political utility of the “great replacement theory” is that it combines two potent, emotionally charged issues on the right. That “theory” — that there is a nefarious group of people hoping to bring immigrants into the United States to shift the nation’s politics to the left — overlaps with […] Read more »