The Guardian: Tommy Robinson and the far right’s new playbook

Yaxley-Lennon frequently complains he is being smeared as a racist and a Nazi; he insists that he doesn’t care about skin colour and that his objection is to Islamist political ideology rather than people. What this misses is that far-right politics almost always involves singling out particular groups on the grounds of their alleged culture and behaviour, as with the way far-right groups have in the past used the “black muggers” panic of the 1970s, or Jewish ritual slaughter. And the way Yaxley-Lennon characterises Muslims is to present them as an alien presence in British society working to harm the majority. In Enemy of the State, previously majority-white areas of Luton are described as having suffered “ethnic cleansing” via Muslim immigration. “We are sleepwalking our way towards a Muslim takeover of the country,” he writes elsewhere, and describes the niqab as “an up-yours that shows exactly how the hardline, majority Muslim community regards the rest of us”. He is also sceptical of Muslims in public life. “You cannot buy loyalty,” he writes. “You buy a measure of allegiance for a while.” [...]

Yaxley-Lennon, meanwhile, is frequently treated as “authentic” by parts of the British media that do not know how to deal with class. A public conversation that often treats being working-class as a kind of ethnic identity only shared by reactionary white people in forgotten suburbs – when, in fact, working-class Britain is the most diverse and numerous section of society – undermines efforts to credibly challenge him. And a journalism profession that contains few people of working-class backgrounds makes it all the more difficult. Take Yaxley-Lennon’s appearance in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in 2011: Paxman’s patrician contempt only bolstered Yaxley-Lennon’s projected image of the little guy versus the liberal elite. By contrast, one of the rare occasions he was convincingly challenged on television was in a debate in 2013 on BBC3 with the rapper, author and activist Akala, who was able to paint a very different picture of working-class Britain. It’s telling that Yaxley-Lennon only gives this 2013 encounter half a sentence in his autobiography, while dwelling at length on his other media appearances.

Why are these changes happening now? One reason is that political ideologies that were once dominant are struggling to make their worldview seem like the obvious one. Put crudely, this is the fallout from several decades when neoliberal globalisation was seen, to varying degrees, as the only game in town. The financial crash and its aftermath rendered that view untenable, but so far no alternative vision has won out. [...]

Yaxley-Lennon is a potential asset to the new, international far-right activism. He has a brand name and a powerful myth that is menacing enough to keep him in the news, and has mobilised support in a number of countries. Conservatives in the US can use his story to boost the “Europe has fallen” narrative promoted in order to justify Trump’s own anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies, while Bannon has already acknowledged his potential to catalyse campaigns across Europe. In the UK, he could become part of a broad rightwing coalition that seeks to mobilise popular anger as Brexit unfolds. The Ukip leader, Batten, has publicly supported Yaxley-Lennon. On 24 October, after Yaxley-Lennon’s most recent court hearing, Batten accompanied him to the House of Lords for a lunch with the Ukip peer Lord Pearson – and is now proposing he be allowed to join the party, in defiance of a long-standing ban on former BNP members. A recent long-term study by Hope Not Hate suggests the places most susceptible to far-right narratives are white-majority communities away from big cities, which have been hit particularly hard by austerity policies and longer-term industrial decline. Another danger is that smaller, violent neo-Nazi groups still exist – as does antisemitic conspiracy theory – and this increased activity in general gives them more space in which to operate.

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Vox: What do the suburbs want?

Of 69 suburban districts held by the GOP before the election, just 32 will remain in Republican hands next year, according to an analysis by the Washington Post’s Dan Balz, one of our preeminent political analysts.. This might not be a temporary aberration, either; President Trump has completely overtaken the Republican Party. [...]

Suburban voters have a discrete set of economic concerns — which congressional Republicans by and large ignored. They fret about rising health care costs, either for themselves or for their aging parents, or both. They want good schools and for their children to be able to afford to go to college. They worry about the job prospects for their kids when they graduate. They are wary of extremism of any kind. [...]

But Republicans also lost where Trump had won in 2016 — like in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, where Tea Party hero Dave Brat fell to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. That win, Matthews said, could be attributed almost entirely to the Richmond suburbs in the district, where Democrats picked up huge margins. [...]

Trump’s approval rating is, remember, unusually low considering the economy. The president was particularly disliked by women. Trump’s approval was stuck in the 30s among those voters, and his disapproval hit the high 50s. Suburban men were more evenly divided, but many still didn’t approve of Trump. This dissatisfaction wasn’t isolated to the coasts either: Trump was deep underwater with suburban voters across the Midwest, where Republicans lost crucial Senate, governor, and House races.

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The New Yorker: What Cafés Did for Liberalism

When social spaces were created outside the direct control of the state (including commercial ones, run for profit), civil society could start to flourish in unexpected ways. This was visible in the spread of café life through European cities, Pinsker observes, in the nineteenth century and afterward. It wasn’t that the conversations in the café were necessarily intellectually productive; it was that the practice of free exchange itself—the ability to interact on equal terms with someone not of your clan or club—generated social habits of self-expression that abetted the appetite for self-government. For Jews, with their constant habit of self-expression and their distant dream of self-government, the café was an especially inviting space. [...]

For Jews, Pinsker argues, the investment in the café as a social institution was, across Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly intense. The great cafés were “thirdspaces,” neither entirely public nor entirely private; they were escape zones where, contrary to the theme from “Cheers,” people often didn’t know your name, or what shtetl you hailed from. A patriotic Polish writer could meet other Polish patriots at a Warsaw café, read the papers, make plans, share poems, or just decide to flee to Paris. A Jewish writer in the same café had first to decide just how Polish to appear, and just how Jewish to remain. This affected how he dressed and whom he sat with, but also which language he wrote in, Yiddish or Polish, and what he chose to write about as he sat there. Pinsker, who teaches Judaic studies at the University of Michigan, tells the story of how, in Warsaw in the nineteen-thirties, a group of Jewish actors came into a café, dressed, as a comic provocation, as “Jews”—in caftans and fake beards—and were urged by the manager to go elsewhere. It was the Jewish regulars who were made most uncomfortable by the practical joke. Not because they were ashamed—as writers, they often wrote unabashedly as Jews—but because they were suddenly made aware of the ambiguities that they relied upon. [...]

Pinsker, lovingly attentive to the habitués of his cafés, leaves the economics of the cafés quite shadowy. The rule, still in place in much of Europe, was that you need buy only a cup of coffee to occupy a seat indefinitely. Customer loyalty is the commercial principle here. Better to sell the same writer a hundred cups of coffee than to sell a hundred writers one cup of coffee, since the hundred-cup man is almost certain to return for the next hundred, and the hundred after that. Recent scholarship has made the case that repeat business is worth much more to a small enterprise than new business, given the stability of “recurring revenue.” The one proviso would seem to be that there has to be enough room for new customers to find a place. The café can’t become too exclusive a club and remain profitable. This may be why the adjective regularly applied to the café is “grand,” or why so many cafés in Europe were exceptionally large spaces, even if, to judge by contemporary drawings and photographs, they were seldom close to being fully occupied.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Accidental Room

In part, Townsend and his displaced friends wanted to do something to reclaim their sense of agency — to assert that spaces like the mall could belong just as much to them as to the developers. In order to do this, they would need to find a space in the mall where they could hide themselves away — an area that was not a store, nor a parking lot, nor a storage area. What they needed was that accidental room that Townsend had spotted years ago. [...]

Townsend and his friends got to work clearing the debris from the space. They filled their backpacks with dirt and grime, then carried it out of the mall. And for every backpack full of debris they took out, they’d bring a pack full of something in. They hauled in gallon jugs of water for drinking and cleaning, clamp lights and extension cords for illumination (which they plugged into the malls internal power system). They even built a cinderblock wall to hide the space from anyone else who might venture into the cavernous little complex from various other potential entrances. [...]

After being handed over to the police and interrogated, Jaffa was eventually let go — but Townsend soon found himself standing in front of a judge in criminal court. The prosecution rattled through a laundry list of offenses. But the judge didn’t seem too impressed by the charges — if anything, he appeared more impressed by the audacity of the secret apartment dwellers. So he gave Townsend a misdemeanor for trespassing and sent him on his way. Townsend, who had lived on and off in the secret apartment for nearly 4 years, got away with a slap on the wrist. But that doesn’t mean he got away entirely.

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Quartz: Polyamorous sex is the most quietly revolutionary political weapon in the United States

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Americans who rejected monogamy typically did so in an effort to throw off mainstream, normative culture and politics. But the attendees of Tableaux fit in with the rest of privileged, gentrified Brooklyn: They match the dark, tattered-glamor aesthetic of the room; wear dark-grey clothes and plenty of eyeliner; and are overwhelmingly white. In a group of more than 50, fewer than five are people of color. And, though people at the party tell me the polyamory community is ahead of the curve on gender politics, most there present as cis; most queer women as femme. Sex is no more prominent here than at any other party in middle-class Brooklyn. We discuss vegan burgers and holiday destinations. Gin and tonics appear and disappear rapidly, and the abundance of iPhones and fast fashion suggests polyamorists have no problem with consumerism.

Yet many polyamorists consider the whole lifestyle to be radically transformative by virtue of its nature. Weeks before I went to Tableaux, I had coffee in Manhattan with Leon Feingold, an exceptionally tall, friendly polyamorist, eager to talk about his high IQ and his sexual philosophies. Feingold, who wore a red Hawaiian shirt and two necklaces, one featuring a Chinese star with flamed tips (designed at Burning Man in commemoration of his late wife) and the other pukka shells, said that polyamorists emphasize the importance of emotional openness and strong communication. When I asked him to be more specific about the values of polyamory, he told me the community embraces sex positivity and celebrates the full gender spectrum.[...]

Perhaps contemporary polyamorists’ embracement of and engagement with mainstream life allows them to surreptitiously change what it means to be “normal.” Progressive changes to gender roles, economic opportunities, and the definition of family, follow as consequences. For example, instead of one person (usually the woman) taking on the housework and the other (usually the man) doing paid labor all day, as in a traditional monogamous economic structure, multiple people living together in a polyamorous relationship can choose to work part time and still have the resources to live comfortably. If you’re okay with multiple roommates, even the most expensive neighborhoods become far more affordable. [...]

Chaele tells me the racial prejudice that exists in polyamorous communities reflects the wider world. “We don’t live in a vacuum utopia,” she says. “White people get centered in everything.” The major polyamory groups are predominantly white, she says, and there are smaller offshoots for those who feel uncomfortable identifying as a minority. Though Chaele is involved in majority-white polyamory groups, she says she occasionally wants to surround herself with other African American polyamorists. “It’s very hard to trust and want to be in predominantly white spaces sometimes,” she says.

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Haaretz: Executions in Saudi Arabia Have Doubled Under Crown Prince, Watchdog Says

Reprieve said there have been nearly 700 executions in Saudi Arabia since 2014. There were an average of 13 executions a month this year, although that number peaked in July when 27 people were executed – including seven on a single day. [...]

Reprieve Director Maya Foa said: “Despite promises of reform from the crown prince, the kingdom is executing drug offenders at an alarmingly high rate, and at least 30 people – including some arrested as teenagers – face imminent execution for exercising their democratic rights. [...]

Nearly 40 percent (58 people) of those executed in 2018 were convicted of drugs offenses, with 77 percent of them foreign nationals. Overall, 49 percent of the people executed this year were foreign nationals

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