If you want to know where the Republican Party is headed, you need to set aside your assumptions and simply listen to what its leaders and activists say—especially when they’re talking amongst themselves. As a reporter and author on the religious right beat over the past dozen years, I’ve made a point of attending such […]

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Carolyn Schulte remembers the events of early 1972. She was 12 years old and finishing the sixth grade in a St. Louis suburb. Her dad was a dentist, as was her grandfather and great-uncle. Her mom stayed home to manage the house and raise her and her brother, John, then age 10. John began to […]

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While Republicans routinely call Democrats “Marxists,” it’s been taboo for Democrats and the American mainstream media to brand Trump and his followers “fascists.” Why is that? The F-word is widely considered over-the-top name-calling, too redolent of Hitler, and risks triggering white-right Twitter trolls or even vigilantism . . . as Democrats instead usually confine their critique of the right […]

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Some 4,000-year-old dogmas, like the Bible’s “eye for an eye,” never die. State-sponsored killings have morphed over millennia (from stonings, beheadings, burning at stakes, firing squads, gas chambers, lynchings, and electric chairs to lethal injections) but continue apace. In the United States, the federal government and the 27 states that still impose the death penalty […]

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It’s high time to declare nuclear weapons obsolete. The U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—entering into force January 22, 2021—underscores the most perilous environmental threat to humankind, a threat that cannot be ignored by the Biden administration. Eighty-six nations, not including the United States and other nuclear weapons states, have signed the treaty […]

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