The Atlantic: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

 The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court. [...]

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons. [...]

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. [...]

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Politics.co.uk: The break-up of the UK is coming - but will it be violent or peaceful?

 Contrary to the current talk of the British empire and the nostalgia around it, they are not Powellites. Their overriding concern instead is the restoration of the Westminster system. For them, our EU membership has been an historical parenthesis. Westminster is all. A century ago, ceding part of Ireland was a price worth paying for keeping the Westminster system intact. So was the loss of India, and the loss of the colonies in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today, next year, whenever, Northern Ireland will follow.

The more troubling question is whether the Brexiters see Scotland in the same way, and whether their view of Scottish independence is the same as that of Unionists south and north of the border. Scotland is a nation of the United Kingdom, not a province that can be snapped off and tacked on to another state. It can only become separate by becoming independent and sovereign. [...]

That project's mode of governance is not the centralised one the less intellectual Brexiters constantly moan about, but actually about subsidiarity - decisions being made at the most local feasible level. By contrast, the heart and distinctiveness of the Westminster system is centralisation. Scottish nationalists believe Scotland would be freer to act autonomously within a federal, decentralised European Union than they are with devolution inside a unitary state.

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UnHerd: Is Critical Race Theory racist?

 The founding father of critical race theory was Derrick Bell, professor at Harvard Law School. Bell argued that racism has not improved and is, in fact permanent, and that whites simply find less obvious and legal ways to maintain their dominance. Bell developed his theory of “Interest convergence” which argued that whites only extend rights to blacks when it is in their own material interest. This cynical and pessimistic materialist approach tends to present empirical evidence of disparities and then claim racism as the sole cause of them, while ignoring progress. [...]

This is how critical race theory developed within the academy. However, since around 2010, it has moved into the mainstream. The ideas we are most likely to hear are those of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi’s How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) were New York Times bestsellers for months and sold out again following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

The work of Ibram X Kendi seems to draw most of its spirit from the materialist approach, presenting us with two intertwined false dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or anti-racist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them.

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New Statesman: Munira Mirza: the former radical leftist advising Boris Johnson

Those who know Mirza describe her as an independent thinker, intelligent, intellectually curious, reasoned, articulate and unflappable. Far from being a strident right-wing Tory, she once flirted with Marxism and is now a libertarian. Like Cummings, her fellow Downing Street iconoclast, she is not a Conservative Party member and is said to harbour no political ambitions of her own. [...]

Mirza does not deny that racism exists in Britain, but she argues that racial inequalities are the result of cultural and socio-economic factors more than institutional racism. She contends that efforts to promote racial equality through diversity programmes and “box-ticking multiculturalism” serve merely to deepen divisions, stoke tribalism and foster a “culture of grievance”. She rejects identity politics based on race and religion in favour of a universal humanity or “universalism”. [...]

Through PX she published “Living Apart Together” (2007), a paper that argued multiculturalism had encouraged Islamic extremism in Britain by dividing people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines instead of promoting a national identity. [...]

She was a principal author of the Tory party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election. As a northerner, like Cummings, she champions the idea of “levelling up”. There has been speculation, given her libertarianism, that she may have encouraged Johnson’s costly reluctance to impose the coronavirus lockdown last spring. True or not, she certainly would not have expected to be overseeing government interventionism on a scale unprecedented since the Second World War.

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New Statesman: The twilight of the Union

The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic overshadowed the trial, and made the constitutional debate about Scotland’s future seem trivial. Suddenly there were other more pressing issues to think about, a lethal and mysterious plague that threatened to overwhelm the NHS and devastate the economy. Although, technically speaking, NHS Scotland is a distinct entity, founded on separate Scottish legislation, this fact belongs to the arcane lore of policy wonks: the NHS is widely regarded in Scotland as a UK institution. During lockdown Scots banged pots and pans on a Thursday night for the NHS, not specifically for the NHS in Scotland. And everybody knew that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s generous furlough scheme came courtesy of the deep pockets of the UK Treasury.

Yet, bizarrely, the Scottish Question did not hibernate. Instead, opinion about Scottish independence shifted significantly during the Covid lockdown. At the start of the year, the pro- and anti-independence camps were running neck and neck in the opinion polls, and remained tied as late as May. But more recent polls demonstrate a marked rise in support for independence, which is now running at 54 per cent, once the don’t knows are excluded. [...]

To be sure, nationalism plays a significant part in the independence cause. But in the broad miscellaneous coalition of voters that supports independence, flag-waving nationalists, though the most obviously visible cohort, rub shoulders with a range of other social types. There are the voters, often middle-aged, who think independence is the best way of preserving what remains of Britain’s cherished welfare state; those who want to live in a normal northern European country – like Denmark or Norway – with a Nordic model of egalitarian social democracy; those who despair of the Brexity delusions of Britain’s post-imperial nostalgia; and a radical younger generation that identifies with Rise, the alternative movement for “Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalism”.

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