The Year’s Racial Flare-Ups: Signs of the Future or Signs of a Last Gasp?

This year has seen disturbing flare-ups around issues of race, immigration, and white nativism generally. … Does the rising tide of worry mean that the nation is descending into a maelstrom of racial conflict? More likely, we are seeing the kind of fearful and angry reaction that major social change […] Read more »

Lies about Migrants and the Rise of the Extreme Right

… Forged in the furnaces of hot cognition and tribal epistemology, hardened opinion dominates cool, fact-based knowledge and provides fertile ground for the spread of falsehoods through social sharing. People in general are biased toward confirmation: they wish to believe that which endorses what they already believe to be true, […] Read more »

It’s the mainstream anti-immigration rhetoric, not the extreme, that’s shaping American politics

… In an interview on NPR, the administration’s immigration chief, Ken Cuccinelli, offered a reworking of the poem that sits at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public […] Read more »

New polls identify fault lines inside the GOP over Trump’s immigration agenda and treatment of asylum seekers

President Trump is building his reelection campaign around the same brand of nativism that energized tens of millions of aggrieved whites and got him elected in 2016. Because of the verities of the electoral college, there is a body of evidence that suggests doubling down on an agenda of exclusion […] Read more »