August | 2016 | Praxis

Weaponized Religion Harms Both Church and State

The benediction to the first night of the Republicans’ convention two weeks ago was unusual. Pastor Mark Burns of South Carolina announced to the delegates “Our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.” He then prayed that “we together can defeat the liberal Democratic Party” and that Republicans “were the conservative party under God”. Mixing religion and politics is nothing new. Having a pastor proclaim members of an opposing political party are “the enemy” is still a rather overt…

It’s Donald Trump’s Tea Party Now

“I had been predicting a tea party resurgence in 2016 because I thought the climate was right for it, but the only problem was that a guy named Donald Trump came along and basically co-opted the movement,” said Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation. Ken Crow, a tea party activist in Iowa, said the “tea party is in turmoil” over how to feel about Mr. Trump. “The hard-core tea party wanted a strict constitutional guy like a Mike Lee or Ted Cruz — someone…

CNN Says It Will Host Town Hall Discussion for Green Party’s Jill Stein

The televised town hall discussion format has been a staple of CNN for decades. Originally done via phoned in questions from viewers, the news channel has since shifted to live group chats and has been doing many of them during this presidential campaign. After airing several featuring candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties, CNN announced Wednesday that it will also be conducting a town hall with Green Party candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday, August 17 at 9:00 p.m. ET. Undoubtedly, the move comes after…

Are the Olympics Irrelevant Now?

Forty-eight percent of Americans say they plan to watch a “great deal” or “fair amount” of the 2016 Summer Olympics. This is a sharp drop from 59% in 2012 and easily the lowest percentage planning to watch compared with the past four Summer Games. Thirty percent say they plan to watch “not much” of the Olympics, and 21% say “none at all” — the highest percentage saying so since Gallup began asking this question in 2000. These results come from a July 13-17 Gallup poll…

The Conservative Echo Chamber Is Making the Right Intellectually Deaf

One of the more interesting developments since the emergence of the web as a mass medium is the establishment of a conservative media presence. Prior to the internet, there were basically no large-audience right-leaning media operations aside from a few talk radio programs. Since the 1996 establishment of Fox News and the popularization of the web, it has now become possible for a conservatively inclined people to consume all kinds of news and opinion catering to their specific tastes and viewpoints. Many right-leaning people have…

Religious People Are Skeptics When It Comes to Biotechnology and Humans

Many Americans are wary of the prospect of implanting a computer chip in their brains to improve their mental abilities or adding synthetic blood to their veins to make them stronger and faster, according to a major new Pew Research Center survey gauging the public’s views on technologies that could enhance human abilities. And this is particularly true of those who are highly religious. For instance, a majority of highly religious Americans (based on an index of common religious measures) say they would not want…

Among Whites, There’s a Strong Correlation Between Racial Antagonism and Trump Support

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign effectively bucked what the political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders adroitly termed the Republican Party’s electoral temptation of race — using implicit racial appeals to win over racially conservative voters without appearing overtly racist. Trump’s play instead was to make several explicitly hostile statements about minority groups. Trump has been willing to go where most Republican presidential candidates haven’t. That might have made anti-minority sentiments a more potent force in the 2016 GOP primaries than in primaries past. That’s plausible, because campaign appeals…

The Incredible Value of ‘Oppression’ in Holding Together the Democratic Coalition

To maintain loyalty, the Democratic party incites anxiety about discrimination and exclusion. A form of reverse race-baiting, perhaps best thought of as bigot-baiting, has become crucial for sustaining the Democratic coalition, which is why we hear so much about “hate” these days. At the recent gay pride parade in New York, a few weeks after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, marchers held aloft an avenue-wide banner that read, “Republican Hate Kills!” It’s important to remember a first law of politics for…

What Does ISIS Want? The Group Has Released a Manifesto to the West

Editor’s note: The following essay was released by the self-described Islamic State in its English-language online magazine, Dabiq, around July 25, 2016. As it is not available in text form, we are reprinting it for educational purposes. Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub by the mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless violence. A hate crime? Yes. Muslims…

Despite Media Hype, Americans Aren’t Freaking Out About Zika

So why aren’t Americans freaking out over Zika? One answer is a question of politics. Ebola’s particularly horrifying symptoms and its position in American pop culture (thanks, Dustin Hoffman) made it fertile ground for political exploitation in the run-up to the 2014 mid-term elections. As Charles L. Briggs and Daniel C. Hallin write in their book, Making Health Public, “Republican politicians and pundits integrated Ebola into a campaign narrative about the failure of the Obama administration to protect the United States from external threats.” With…

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