'Collapse Of Civilization

By Sean Martin & Jane Lavende

Scientists have issued a stark warning that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity as societies grapple with intensifying pressures from our planet's evolving environment.

Earth is barreling toward several critical "global tipping" points that risk triggering devastating consequences for humankind.

Among the most dire milestones on the horizon are the Amazon Rainforest's collapse, the total dissolution of ice sheets at the poles and surging worldwide temperatures.

When coupled with our booming population, these elements could unleash widespread catastrophe. It comes after a 'time traveler' from the year 4413 made a terrifying claim about the future of humanity.

• 'China's Nostradamus' terrifying warning about how US-Iran war will end

• Doomsday map reveals the 4 safest US states to survive a nuclear war

As ice sheets dissolve, ocean levels will rise dramatically, shrinking available living space for humanity even as our numbers explode, driving displaced communities deeper into interior regions, reports the Daily Star.

Climbing temperatures will make enormous portions of Earth unlivable, creating waves of climate migrants forced to seek new homes, while Amazon destruction and the loss of other tropical forests will speed up the planet's warming trajectory.

Will Steffen, emeritus professor at Australian National University, warns that humanity needs at least 30 years to change direction, though by that point the damage may be irreversible.

Prof Steffan warned Voice of Action: "Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the 'reaction time' needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the 'intervention time' left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse."

He continued: "That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system."

The professor posed a stark question: "The fact that many of the features of the Earth System that are being damaged or lost constitute 'tipping points' that could well link to form a 'tipping cascade' raises the ultimate question: Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?".

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Prof Steffan drew a chilling parallel to explain the crisis facing humanity.

He explained: "If the Titanic realises that it's in trouble and it has about 5km that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it's only 3km away from the iceberg, it's already doomed."

Global temperatures keep rising relentlessly, with scientists confirming the mercury has increased by roughly 0.15-0.20C every ten years.

The warming has led to dramatic ice loss in polar areas, while researchers have also raised concerns about frozen ground melting beneath the surface. Permafrost constitutes a permanently frozen layer beneath the ground, covering 18 million square kilometres throughout the uppermost areas of the northern hemisphere.

This frozen zone contains rocks, soil, sand and safeguards remnants of plant life and microorganisms that have stayed entombed in the permafrost for thousands of years.

Yet this also means the carbon dioxide (CO2) from dead vegetation and microorganisms has been similarly stored in Earth's natural deep freeze - and as permafrost begins to melt at an alarming rate, this CO2 will eventually be released into the atmosphere

Current estimates suggest there could be up to 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon stored in permafrost.

It comes as a horror map revealed the states where 75% of Americans would die in the event of a nuclear attack. -MSN 

IDF’s War Crimes

Israel’s willingness to investigate its own, even if a case is later dropped, highlights a key distinction from adversaries who would never hold their own accountable for killing Israelis or Jews.

By Yonah Jeremy Bob

In many senses, the IDF’s first official alleged war crimes report regarding Israeli soldiers’ conduct during the Israel-Hamas War was too little too late.

The report was released on Wednesday. From a pro-Israel perspective, for nearly three years Israel and the IDF have not been fully putting forth their narrative into the public sphere to defend themselves against genocide and other allegations.

Sure, there have been generic defenses about Hamas using human shields and the IDF trying to evacuate civilians away from the fighting (both of which are true), but at some point militaries have to address the specific allegations of distinct incidents.

For Israeli critics, the nearly three-year delay has solidified their conclusion that the IDF and Israel are not interested in true justice, but in a fancy whitewash process.

And yet, after both of those criticisms, the report was an important staThe IDF only gave the public an update on five of its 150 criminal probes, not to mention over 3,000 disciplinary probes.

But the results in the five probes defied some critics’ expectations that there would be no deeper probes at all.

In two of the cases, IDF soldiers and commanders will be questioned under criminal caution, and may yet be indicted.

Critics are correct that indictments against Israeli soldiers for killing Palestinians are even rarer than criminal probes.

But they are not nonexistent, with at least half a dozen such cases in the decade before October 7.

And every time the IDF questions soldiers, not to mention commanders, under criminal caution, it creates major waves among the political class and general population.

Even when the IDF legal division later may reach a conclusion that an indictment would not succeed, and the case should be dropped, the simple act of interrogating Israel’s own is exactly what differentiates it and other democracies from many of the Jewish state’s enemies, who would never dream of putting someone on trial for killing Israelis/Jews

Criminal interrogation achieves a deterrent effect

While critics say that absent an indictment or even a conviction, there is no deterrence for soldiers to be more careful, in many cases the criminal interrogation itself, which leaves the soldiers and those around them in doubt for an extended period, achieves a deterrent effect.

Next, critics will compare the IDF legal division’s performance in this war negatively versus in past wars.

They will note the IDF legal division opened 32 criminal probes following the 2014 Gaza War when Israel killed over 2,100 Palestinians, at least 50% civilians.

Further, they will claim that after killing over 70,000 Palestinians – even if 25,000-30,000 were Hamas or killed in internal Palestinian fighting – 150 criminal probes is not even close to adequate.

They will denigrate the more than 3,000 disciplinary probes, claiming they are jokes that can be ignored completely.

There is no easy answer to some of these charges.

If Israel tried to open the same ratio of criminal probes per Palestinian killed during this war compared to the 2014 Gaza conflict, there would be over 1,050 criminal probes.

And no one would claim that fewer mistakes were made in this war, with a massive number of highly documented errors which led to the tragic killing of a sizable number of Palestinians.

IDF admits the errors it has made

In some cases, the IDF has admitted that tank shells hit the wrong target, in others that mistaken intelligence indicated that all civilians had left an area where dozens were still hiding and killed by aerial bombs, and in yet others where missiles hit one Hamas location but that location turned out to be linked to an unknown underground tunnel which then unexpectedly toppled an entire block of civilian homes on their residents.

In other words, there is no debate that a large volume of errors were made.

The question is how those errors are understood.

Pro-Israel advocates will note that these three years of war can be broken down into literally millions of smaller operations and fights versus Hamas, house-to-house, tunnel section to tunnel section. They will add that even if more mistakes were made than in any prior war, the volume of mistakes was still small compared to the number of battles.

In terms of time, some decisions were made earlier, but still have not been publicized, with The Jerusalem Post exclusively publishing back on February 8 that the IDF legal division had already delved into and closed dozens of cases, but was withholding publication.

Advocates will correctly note that at times the environment of criticism which enveloped Israel, even in October 2023 before the stains of blood of the 1,200 slaughtered Israelis were cleaned, has been intense and grossly disconnected from facts and context. This led Israeli officials to often hold back on publicizing their decisions out of fear that critics would abuse anything they put out.

Once the International Court of Justice took the spurious genocide charges against Israel seriously and the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against between two and five senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli hesitance to publicize information which could be abused became even stronger.

Moreover, Israeli legal officials would note that it was not easy to pick a time to publicize their results when the government has been trying to fire the Attorney-General, overhaul the court system, and threatened to go after IDF legal officials who would dare to charge soldiers.

Legal blunder of Sde Teiman saga 

The Sde Teiman saga is a case in point: Israeli legal officials started with good intentions but ended up with the worst of all worlds.

In July 2024, then IDF legal division chief Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi faced hundreds of Israeli civilians, including some government Knesset members, who literally broke into an army base to try to free arrested IDF prison guards, who were being questioned for allegedly beating a Palestinian detainee.

At one stage, Tomer-Yerushalmi issued indictments against five soldiers and started to try to move the case to trial.

However, she severely erred in illegally leaking evidence against the five soldiers prior to trial (had she presented the evidence at trial or received permission from the IDF chief or the courts to publicize the evidence pretrial, there would have been no issue), then trying to cover up her illegal act, and then appeared to have a sensational public breakdown, almost committing suicide or faking suicide.

Ultimately, her successor, current IDF legal chief Maj. Gen. Itay Offir, closed the case not because he found the five defendants innocent, but largely because of the fantastical sideshow Tomer-Yerushalmi created, which he thought made a trial untenable.

Underlying Tomer-Yerushalmi’s clearly illegal leaking actions was a reasonable intent to ensure that the arrested soldiers be probed and tried on the charges as opposed to a mob breaking them out of prison with no accountability.

The fact that she melted down not only said something about her own personal failings, but also about the domestic atmosphere and unprecedented pressure that the government and portions of the public have placed on any legal officials daring to probe IDF soldiers’ actions.

All of that is to say that it becomes less surprising that Israeli legal officials took longer to publish their results when they knew that both most Israelis and most global critics would mercilessly attack them and their reputations for doing so.

There was no “reward” for honestly addressing complexity waiting at the end of the road.

It seems that Tomer-Yerushalmi’s fears delayed publication at least since January 2025, when sources first told the Post that many updates could already be published, with no real coherent explanation why those decisions were delayed.

Practically speaking, Offir cannot be blamed as he only took office in November 2025.

Nine months is not an unreasonable time for legal study

Publishing the results in nine months was certainly not fast, but also is not unreasonably slow, taking into account how much he had to study from scratch when he came on board.

But all of these internal Israeli sagas will not quiet critics and do not repair the damage done to Israel’s global legitimacy by the severe delay in publishing the report.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed alongside tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists, and there needs to be a more timely accounting for that.

The IDF put out five reports on its criminal probes and indictments following the 2014 Gaza conflict. It will eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, need to put out at least that many, or its future reports will need to address a larger number of cases.

Of course that will only be a partial accounting.

One of the reasons that the ICC has been able to go after Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials is because Israel has not probed any of them, only lower-down IDF soldiers involved in specific attacks.

But what about the policy decision to level 80-90% of Gaza’s structures? What about the decision to block food aid from March to May 2025, even if Israeli estimates were that there was sufficient food inventory for many months? What about the general ratio of “acceptable” collateral civilian deaths to military targets being hit even when there were military targets?

Offir cannot probe this.

Former deputy attorney-general Roy Schondorf already in May 2024 publicly recommended the one proper way to handle these issues: a re-run of the post-2009 Gaza conflict Turkel Commission.

Israel has probed its war-making decisions before.

If it does again, the ICC will have to freeze its arrest-warrant process.

Most importantly, probing everyone, from the highest officials to the lowest, has a shot at convincing those fair-minded people in the West and elsewhere that, however imperfect, Israel does care about human rights.

Such a detailed narrative is a moral obligation to do justice to Gazan civilians who got wrongly caught in the crossfire and to bring to justice any soldiers who broke the rules, and it can also finally put the simplistic, and sometimes antisemitic, genocide campaigners on the defensive for the first time, where they will have to address facts and depth, and not just make generic accusations. -JP

Gun Violence

By Christopher Wiggins

As the nation observes the sixth annual National Gun Violence Survivors Week, stories of survivors echo a poignant reminder of the ongoing crisis in America. National Gun Violence Survivors Week not only highlights personal stories but also casts a spotlight on the broader impact of gun violence in America. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, an average yeOar witnesses over 25,000 hate crimes in the U.S. involving a firearm.

The week also brings to the fore the disproportionate effect of gun violence on the LGBTQ+ community. Amid the backdrop of numerous homicides of transgender people and increasing firearm-related hate crimes and gun suicides, gun violence survivors like Sara Grossman and Vincent Perez share their harrowing journeys of loss, resilience, and advocacy.

“These numbers are harrowing — in no other country in this world do we experience the kind of carnage that we do in America via gun violence,” Grossman tells The Advocate.

Grossman, a Denver-based Moms Demand Action volunteer and senior fellow with the Everytown Survivor Network in Colorado, carries the weight of her friend Drew Leinonen’s death in the Pulse nightclub shooting. Leinonen was one of 49 people killed in the 2016 shooting, and 53 more people who were injured survived. Transforming grief into purpose, she and other friends of Leinonen founded The Dru Project in his honor, creating safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community.

“I had to really sit and think about what meaning I can return to the world in his honor,” Grossman says.

In Oregon, Perez, who lives in Portland and is also a volunteer and senior fellow with Everytown, faced a life-altering tragedy when his partner, Shane Colombo, fell victim to gun violence.

In 2018, then in Chicago, Colombo, a 25-year-old who had beaten cancer as a teenager, was shot and killed by a stray bullet in the Rogers Park neighborhood just four hours after arriving in the city to start his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Northwestern University. He was caught in the crossfire of a gun battle while running an errand to buy clothes hangers. Colombo chose Chicago to be with his Perez.

“It’s such a multifaceted mind fudge that people just don’t understand,” he says of the trauma of losing Colombo to such violence. Perez now channels his loss into advocacy, emphasizing the importance of mental health and equitable resources in gun law reforms.

As National Gun Violence Survivors Week concludes, the insights shared by Grossman and Perez underscore the larger narrative surrounding gun violence in the LGBTQ+ community, as illuminated by a 2022 Everytown report.

The report revealed that over 25,000 hate crimes involving a firearm occur annually in the U.S., disproportionately affecting queer individuals. LGBTQ+ youth face a significantly higher risk of experiencing weapon-involved bias-motivated violence compared to their non-LGBTQ+ peers. The alarming data, supplemented by research from the Human Rights Campaign, indicated that 17 percent of LGBTQ+ youth had been threatened or harmed with a weapon at school, a figure that rises to 29 percent among trans youth and 30 percent among questioning youth.

Everytown for Gun Safety’s research shows there's been a 93 percent increase in homicides of transgender people from 2017 to 2021. More than 70 percent involved a gun. It's alarming and underscores the specific vulnerabilities faced by the transgender community, particularly Black transgender women. This is part of a broader epidemic of gun violence affecting various segments of the population.

Speaking from his own experience and research, Perez highlights the grim reality this community faces. “There are over 25,000 hate crimes that involve a firearm in the U.S. in general and 69 per day,” he says. He draws particular attention to the specific risks faced by LGBTQ+ individuals. His advocacy work, rooted in his loss, aims to bring about legislative changes that protect not just the LGBTQ+ community but all Americans from wh

at he calls the “scourge of gun violence.”

According to a Pew Research Center analysis from last April, the United States saw the highest number of gun-related deaths in 2021 than any other year on record. This figure included record numbers of both gun murders and gun suicides, emphasizing that the crisis of gun violence is not confined to any single community. In 2021, 54 percent of all gun-related deaths were suicides, while 43 percent were murders, according to the report.

A December report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a stark and alarming trend: the rate of suicides involving guns in the United States has reached the highest level since record-keeping began over 50 years ago.

In 2022, the rate increased by over 10 percent compared to 2019, with significant disparities among racial and ethnic groups. This increase in firearm suicides coincides with a rise in gun sales during the pandemic, suggesting a correlation between the availability of firearms and an increase in suicide rates, according to the report. The Trevor Project’s 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health paints a grim picture of the mental health challenges faced by LGBTQ+ youth, with 45 percent seriously considering suicide. The need for affirming environments is critical, as positive school and home atmospheres have been shown to reduce suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ youth.

The role of misinformation and media literacy in the conversation about gun violence is another crucial aspect, survivors say. Grossman, who has a background in digital communications, emphasizes the need for disseminating accurate information.

“We live in two different worlds right now. A lot of people are really out there just looking for anger-tainment,” she says.

Human Rights Campaign's national press secretary Brandon Wolf, who survived the Pulse shooting, wrote about the loss of his friend Leinonen — the same friend whose killing inspired Grossman's work — in his memoirA Place for Us.

In a statement to The Advocate, Wolf said, “Hate is dangerous; armed hate is deadly. America's gun violence epidemic alongside rising anti-LGBTQ+ violence has devastating impacts on our community – empty seats at dinner tables, missing faces at birthday parties, and the scars of trauma that linger long past the shots that are fired.”

He added: “Whether it was the horrific assault on Pulse nightclub in 2016, the devastating attack at Club Q in 2022, or the ongoing violence being inflicted on LGBTQ+ people across the country, the fight to end gun violence is our fight. This Gun Violence Survivors Week, let's deepen our commitment to that work – and the work of honoring those devastated by it with action.”

For Grossman, her work with The Dru Project and involvement in Everytown have been lifelines, she says, offering a platform to advocate but also networks of support.

“The survivor group that I joined to become a fellow, some of those people are my closest friends,” she says, stressing the importance of community in healing.

Although Perez is now in a happy and loving relationship, the loss of Colombo will always stay with him, he says. He honors the loss through his involvement as an involuntary member of those touched by gun violence who have been brought into activism.

As National Gun Violence Survivors Week comes to a close, the stories of Grossman and Perez, among many others, continue to resonate. Their voices memorialize those lost and serve as a catalyst for change, demanding action from policymakers and the public to address this critical issue.

“It’s going to always sit with me,” Grossman says.

If you are having thoughts of suicide or are concerned that someone you know may be, resources are available to help. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 is for people of all ages and identities. Trans Lifeline, designed for transgender or gender-nonconforming people, can be reached at (877) 565-8860. The lifeline also provides resources to help with other crises, such as domestic violence situations. The Trevor Project Lifeline, for LGBTQ+ youth (ages 24 and younger), can be reached at (866) 488-7386. Users can also access chat services at TheTrevorProject.org/Help or text START to 678678

The Age Of Insurrection

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with this,” investigative reporter David Neiwert told us, followed by a tremendous sigh, as if setting down an enormous weight that someone else would be obliged to pick up. “Next, I’m writing a book about whales.”

We were at the International Conference on Hate Studies,1 a biennial gathering of scholars, researchers, journalists, and fellow travelers who spend our time tracking fascists. There to speak on understanding and countering hate in the Northwest, Neiwert was a veteran in this crowd: his three decades of reporting on the Far Right includes several books on the subject, making him one of the beat’s key journalists.

In hand Neiwert had a preview copy of his latest book. His longest to date at over 500 pages, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy 2 is the result of a career spent dredging the swamp of the American Far Right—and with it, nights attending militia meetings, days muddling through White nationalist demonstrations, and countless hours scouring fascist message boards. Through these efforts, Neiwert has built the most incisive, compelling, and accurate look at the Trump movement’s fringes through the former President’s rise and controversial final months.

I had first met Neiwert when he was promoting his 2017 book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,3 a definitive chronicle of the rise of the Patriot, Alt Right, and MAGA movements that led to Trump’s election. Neiwert’s reporting had a unique quality: no matter how established he was in covering this world, he always found something new, injected a fresh perspective into the coverage, and explained to readers why it mattered to their daily lives.

Neiwert’s new opus, The Age of Insurrection, continues in this vein, leading the reader through a complicated and multitudinous world of conspiracy grifters, armed insurgents, and online cultists. The book has a certain breathlessness to it. Covering one of the narrowest time frames in Neiwert’s canon, the book strings together a narrative so overwhelming, with such a broad cast of characters, that it’s surprising he was able to capture it in as few pages as he did. 

From the opening page, Neiwert’s prose feels like a gunshot: The Age of Insurrection starts with the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and never truly leaves it behind. Instead, Neiwert focuses on the years and months leading to January 6. He places the insurrection in context by weaving together chapters on groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the QAnon movement and the online conspiracy world, White nationalism during and after the Alt Right, and, especially, the worldview that these groups have tried to construct from a hodgepodge of rumors, half-truths, and bold-faced lies. The book is rich in detail and delivered through classic nonfiction storytelling, a craft Neiwert has honed for many years. He first tracked this story as a newspaper reporter in Idaho chasing violent militants at Aryan Nations, then across the country at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more recently, while reporting for Daily Kos. The Age of Insurrection is the culmination of his feverish journalistic coverage of the Far Right’s activities during Trump’s presidency. 

The book is broken down by activist type and time period, taking readers through the various stages that mobilized subgroups of America’s Far Right: Trumpism’s turn to seditious conspiracy, followed by QAnon’s break with reality, and the return of this unhinged style of politics into the mainstream electoral realm. In doing so, Neiwert examines how the insurrection, which is often discussed in isolation as a singular, if catastrophic event, was actually the culmination of hundreds of smaller insurrections. As Neiwert observes in the book’s “postscript,” the Far Right isn’t just preparing for war, they are already “at war.”4 The final third of the book focuses on this culture of insurrection, as cultivated by the Trump years, and its result on January 6, 2021. Neiwert’s detailed reporting drills home the significance of the violence the U.S. has collectively endured and can leave a reader feeling brutalized: it’s been a hard few years for many—especially marginalized communities facing far-right violence, such as homes with trans children and activists fighting police brutality. But the author never fails to remind us that people put up a fight. Everyday community members refused to accept this slow-moving coup, acting in ways big and small throughout. The “age of insurrection” was also an age of resistance. It still is. 

Rather than provide an encyclopedia, Neiwert zooms in on a few subjects and regions to share his vantage point with readers. The Pacific Northwest—particularly, Oregon and Washington, where he resides—is central to Neiwert’s account of organized violence on the Far Right. A quick look at the region’s past and present illustrates why this focus is warranted. As a center of the Klan in the 1920s and neonazi skinheads in the 1980s, and where Anti-Racist Action and antifa came into their own, the Pacific Northwest is where activists continue to face off in the streets over which political vision will prosper. The region’s growing rural Patriot movement and far-right backlash to “blue state” values has also generated a vanguard of militant antifascist resistance. Neiwert’s attention turns here to increasing clashes between Proud Boys and other far-right groups and antifascists. Amid tear gas fog and street fights at these confrontations, Neiwert and I shuffled between these groups, fending off angry “patriots” asking if we were “antifa,” and watching as police turned their attention on the antifascist crowd. Age of Insurrection captures the heat and paranoia in the air at those events, which have wafted into the suburbs and exurbs and become the country’s general tenor.

Like his books Alt-America and Red Pill, Blue Pill 5, Neiwert discusses how conspiracy theories and misinformation have enabled these movements to capture the political imaginations of those they hope to recruit. Antifa conspiracy theories are a mainstay of this process of recasting social progress as being piloted by covert malevolence. Neiwert chronicles how a small radical movement became the outsized boogeyman that justified some of the Far Right’s worst excesses in streets and statehouses across the country. Far-right radicals and Patriot stalwarts live in a different world than the rest of us, seeing around every corner “communist subversion” and “queer perversions” that threaten to erode the stable lives they and many other working-class conservatives believed they were promised. In such a heightened state of fear, anything becomes possible, including violence as a seemingly pure, restorative act—thus wiping away the possibility of a “peaceful transfer of power” that supposedly defined the American experiment.

Early in Trump’s presidency, in 2017, I heard Neiwert say to a crowd, “I’m not ready to give up on America.”6 He spoke with a kind of optimism then. Readers of his latest treatise might wonder which part of that America is left, whether its democratic values are reclaimable, or if it was always an illusion. The last eight years have shattered any collective belief of forward momentum built into this country’s DNA, whether from the failure to stop a careening Far Right, our inaction on climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement’s magnifying glass on structural and institutional racism, or the January 6 insurrection’s frightening image of our future.

The Age of Insurrection ends suddenly, which makes sense. We started at the conclusion, which became our lens for the entire journey: we know we will end with the doors to the Capitol bursting open and an occupation afoot. As the Trump administration came to an end, Trumpism went into overdrive. The January 6 insurrection was not a capstone to Trump’s reign, but a manifesto of resistance for what came next: an extralegal assault on U.S. democracy from opponents who deem fraudulent its political legacy. We are now living in the book’s aforementioned Age of Insurrection, and the years discussed in the book are simply a prelude. While Neiwert analyzes their impact, he also catalogues them in a narrative framework, acting as our memory by documenting stories that would be unbelievable if they weren’t set on the page. In a certain sense, the book doesn’t end as much as it leaves us in the present, an unwritten sequel that continues the same terrible story we have experienced. 

As Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote from an Italian prison, a revolutionary change in society requires a shift in values, identity, and sense of reality from the masses who would have to enact such a revolution.7 While the violence of January 6 may seem like the real threat to America, it was ancillary developments, conspiracy theories, disaffection, and the breakdown of civil relationships and family bonds that made up the bulk of Neiwert’s horror as he watched the values that he treasured in America crumble. Age of Insurrection plows through all this at a breakneck pace. The book’s concluding abruptness may be its most profound commentary: nothing has ended.

This continuing violence brings us back to the conference. Neiwert’s sense of exhaustion was not new, nor was it uncommon among our peers. In regular meetups over the past ten years, we’ve shared recent scoops, imperiled projects, and “war stories” about this work and its personal cost. But as years went by, and as Trump’s ascent changed the political landscape, fatigue set in. We are tired. Dave’s not the only one.

At post-conference drinks, some of us shared hopeful stories about communities we had been traveling in: mutual aid projects during the pandemic, growing progressive religious groups, the labor movement’s return. Dave smiled wistfully, drinking quietly. 

“I appreciate your optimism, but I’m not sure I share it,” he told me as we called it a night. “It’s not necessarily that I think the Right is going to win in the end. It’s just that a lot of people might die along the way.”

This review from the Fall 2023/Winter 2024 issue of The Public Eye is republished with the permission of Political Research Associates, Religion Dispatches’ parent organization. -Religion Dispatch

Endnotes

1 The conference is hosted by Gonzaga University’s Center for the Study of Hate. 

2 David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2023).  

3 Neiwert, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2017).

4 Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection, 450. 

5 Shane Burley, “Conspiracy Theories Are Killing Us — and Trump’s Departure Hasn’t Ended Them,” Truthout, March 14, 2021, https://truthout.org/articles/conspiracy-theories-are-killing-us-and-trumps-departure-hasnt-ended-them/. 

6 David Neiwert, talk at Powell’s City of Books, November 5, 2017. 

7 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York City: Columbia University Press), 2011

How America Changed

By Michael Dimock And John Gramlich

Donald Trump stunned the political world in 2016 when he became the first person without government or military experience ever to be elected president of the United States. His four-year tenure in the White House revealed extraordinary fissures in American society but left little doubt that he is a figure unlike any other in the nation’s history.

Trump, the New York businessman and former reality TV show star, won the 2016 election after a campaign that defied norms and commanded public attention from the moment it began. His approach to governing was equally unconventional.

Other presidents tried to unify the nation after turning from the campaign trail to the White House. From his first days in Washington to his last, Trump seemed to revel in the political fight. He used his presidential megaphone to criticize a long list of perceived adversaries, from the news media to members of his own administration, elected officials in both political parties and foreign heads of state. The more than 26,000 tweets he sent as president provided an unvarnished, real-time account of his thinking on a broad spectrum of issues and eventually proved so provocative that Twitter permanently banned him from its platform. In his final days in office, Trump became the first president ever to be impeached twice – the second time for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the election he lost – and the nation’s first chief executive in more than 150 years to refuse to attend his successor’s inauguration.

Trump’s policy record included major changes at home and abroad. He achieved a string of long-sought conservative victories domestically, including the biggest corporate tax cuts on record, the elimination of scores of environmental regulations and a reshaping of the federal judiciary. In the international arena, he imposed tough new immigration restrictions, withdrew from several multilateral agreements, forged closer ties with Israel and launched a tit-for-tat trade dispute with China as part of a wider effort to address what he saw as glaring imbalances in America’s economic relationship with other countries. 

Many questions about Trump’s legacy and his role in the nation’s political future will take time to answer. But some takeaways from his presidency are already clear from Pew Research Center’s studies in recent years. In this essay, we take a closer look at a few of the key societal shifts that accelerated – or emerged for the first time – during the tenure of the 45th president.

Deeply partisan and personal divides

Trump’s status as a political outsider, his outspoken nature and his willingness to upend past customs and expectations of presidential behavior made him a constant focus of public attention, as well as a source of deep partisan divisions.

Even before he took office, Trump divided Republicans and Democrats more than any incoming chief executive in the prior three decades.1 The gap only grew more pronounced after he became president. An average of 86% of Republicans approved of Trump’s handling of the job over the course of his tenure, compared with an average of just 6% of Democrats – the widest partisan gap in approval for any president in the modern era of polling.2 Trump’s overall approval rating never exceeded 50% and fell to a low of just 29% in his final weeks in office, shortly after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol.

Republicans and Democrats weren’t just divided over Trump’s handling of the job. They also interpreted many aspects of his character and personality in fundamentally opposite ways. In a 2019 survey, at least three-quarters of Republicans said the president’s words sometimes or often made them feel hopeful, entertained, informed, happy and proud. Even larger shares of Democrats said his words sometimes or often made them feel concerned, exhausted, angry, insulted and confused.

The strong reactions that Trump provoked appeared in highly personal contexts, too. In a 2019 survey, 71% of Democrats who were single and looking for a relationship said they would definitely or probably not consider being in a committed relationship with someone who had voted for Trump in 2016. That far exceeded the 47% of single-and-looking Republicans who said they would not consider being in a serious relationship with a Hillary Clinton voter.

Many Americans opted not to talk about Trump or politics at all. In 2019, almost half of U.S. adults (44%) said they wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about Trump with someone they didn’t know well. A similar share (45%) said later that year that they had stopped talking politics with someone because of something that person had said.  

In addition to the intense divisions that emerged over Trump personally, his tenure saw a further widening of the gulf between Republicans and Democrats over core political values and issues, including in areas that weren’t especially partisan before his arrival. 

In 1994, when Pew Research Center began asking Americans a series of 10 “values questions” on subjects including the role of government, environmental protection and national security, the average gap between Republicans and Democrats was 15 percentage points. By 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, the average partisan gap on those same questions had more than doubled to 36 points, the result of a steady, decades-long increase in polarization.

On some issues, there were bigger changes in thinking among Democrats than among Republicans during Trump’s presidency. That was especially the case on topics such as race and gender, which gained new attention amid the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. In a 2020 survey that followed months of racial justice protests in the U.S., for instance, 70% of Democrats said it is “a lot more difficult” to be a Black person than to be a White person in the U.S. today, up from 53% who said the same thing just four years earlier. Republican attitudes on the same question changed little during that span, with only a small share agreeing with the Democratic view.

On other issues, attitudes changed more among Republicans than among Democrats. One notable example related to views of higher education: Between 2015 and 2017, the share of Republicans who said colleges and universities were having a negative effect on the way things were going in the U.S. rose from 37% to 58%, even as around seven-in-ten Democrats continued to say these institutions were having a positive effect.

A dearth of shared facts and information

One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats could agree on during Trump’s tenure is that they didn’t share the same set of facts. In a 2019 survey, around three-quarters of Americans (73%) said most Republican and Democratic voters disagreed not just over political plans and policies, but over “basic facts.”

Much of the disconnect between the parties involved the news media, which Trump routinely disparaged as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Republicans, in particular, expressed widespread and growing distrust of the press. In a 2019 survey, Republicans voiced more distrust than trust in 2o of the 30 specific news outlets they were asked about, even as Democrats expressed more trust than distrust in 22 of those same outlets. Republicans overwhelmingly turned to and trusted one outlet included in the study – Fox News – even as Democrats used and expressed trust in a wider range of sources. The study concluded that the two sides placed their trust in “two nearly inverse media environments.” 

Some of the media organizations Trump criticized most vocally saw the biggest increases in GOP distrust over time. The share of Republicans who said they distrusted CNN rose from 33% in a 2014 survey to 58% by 2019. The proportion of Republicans who said they distrusted The Washington Post and The New York Times rose 17 and 12 percentage points, respectively, during that span.3

In addition to their criticisms of specific news outlets, Republicans also questioned the broader motives of the media. In surveys fielded over the course of 2018 and 2019, Republicans were far less likely than Democrats to say that journalists act in the best interests of the public, have high ethical standards, prevent political leaders from doing things they shouldn’t and deal fairly with all sides. Trump’s staunchest GOP supporters often had the most negative views: Republicans who strongly approved of Trump, for example, were much more likely than those who only somewhat approved or disapproved of him to say journalists have very low ethical standards. -Pew Research 

Asexuality

New research on asexuality shows why it’s so important for doctors and therapists to distinguish between episodes of low libido and a consistent lack of sexual attraction

By Allison Parshall

In graduate school people often asked Megan Carroll whether she was gay. Her sociology dissertation was on inequalities within communities of gay fathers, so her research participants were curious about how she identified. “I would say, ‘Oh, I'm maybe mostly straight? I don't really know. It's complicated.’”

It was, at the time, the closest she could get to the truth. She'd had crushes on both boys and girls in high school and had been in a relationship with a man; being around her romantic interests sent her heart fluttering in her chest. But nothing like that happened when she considered having sex with any of them—she simply wasn't interested. Her friends assured her she just needed to meet the right person, someone who would light her fire.

When that hadn't happened by the time she was 18, Carroll thought she might simply have a low libido and went looking for an explanation. Thinking her birth control might be to blame, she spoke with a nurse, who suggested that perhaps her boyfriend was “just a bad lover.” Then Carroll wondered whether it was the pills she was taking to treat her depression. Over the next 12 years she visited multiple therapists, psychiatrists and physicians and tried different antidepressants—including a less commonly prescribed drug that gave her tachycardia, or a faster heart rate. Eventually she settled on one that had shown no measurable effect on sex drive in clinical trials.

Throughout these years of experimentation, Carroll's libido—the physiological desire for sexual stimulation and release—did fluctuate. But what remained constant was that her libido was rarely, if ever, directed at another person, even her crushes.

In 2016 Carroll stumbled on a Facebook post about asexuality. She'd heard the term, typically defined as experiencing little to no sexual attraction, but had never felt that it applied to her. Then Carroll read a comment that mentioned demisexuality, a specific experience of feeling sexual attraction only after developing an emotional bond with someone. The idea that asexuality was a spectrum opened an entire world that had never been discussed in her gender and sexuality courses—one in which sexual desire was not necessary for a fulfilling life.

Because this idea subverts a cultural assumption about what it means to be human, it is often difficult for asexual people to recognize, let alone embrace, their identity. “Your very existence is, in some way, in opposition” to the societal norm, says CJ Chasin, an asexual gender and sexuality scholar at the University of Windsor in Canada. Even after realizing she probably was asexual, Carroll still visited doctors to experiment with her medications before finally accepting that she just is the way she is.

Over the past two decades psychological studies have shown that asexuality should be classified not as a disorder but as a stable sexual orientation akin to homosexuality or heterosexuality. Both cultural awareness and clinical medicine have been slow to catch on. It's only recently that academic researchers have begun to look at asexuality not as an indicator of health problems but as a legitimate, underexplored way of being human.

In biology, the word “asexual” typically gets used in reference to species that reproduce without sex, such as bacteria and aphids. But in some species that do require mating to have offspring, such as sheep and rodents, scientists have observed individuals that don't appear driven to engage in the act.

This behavior is more analogous to human asexuality, a concept rarely mentioned in medical literature until recently. In a pamphlet published in 1896, pioneering German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld described people without sexual desire, a state he called “anesthesia sexualis.” In 1907 Reverend Carl Schlegel, an early gay rights activist, advocated for the “same laws” for “the homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals [and] asexuals.” When sexologist Alfred Kinsey devised his scale of sexual orientation in the 1940s, he created a “Category X” for the respondents who unexpectedly reported no sociosexual contacts or reactions—exceptions from his model whom he estimated made up 1.5 percent of all males between the ages of 16 and 55 in the U.S. Asexuality was largely absent from scientific research over the subsequent decades, although it was occasionally referenced by activists and scholars in the gay liberation movement. -Scientific America

UK Govt Considers Havoc Of Porn Epidemic On Society

The Government has launched an investigation into pornography’s devastating impact on society as part of a review of current regulation following the passing of the Online Safety Act.

The Call for Evidence, which is part of the Independent Pornography Review, will collect views on “the impact of pornographic content on relationships, sexual behaviours, mental health and people’s views of women and girls”.

It is set to address the separate regimes covering online and offline pornographic material to ensure restrictions are consistently applied.

‘Abhorrent’

Baroness Bertin, who is leading the review, said there is a “whole tonne” of “completely abhorrent” online pornography, which the British Board of Film Classification would prohibit from sale on DVD or video.

She called for the loopholes to be shut, so content involving child-like actors or those purporting to be family members would no longer be available either online or offline.

The Peer stated: “The damaging impact that extreme pornography is having on society cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.”

Violence

National Police Lead for Child Protection Ian Critchley welcomed the review as he warned teenagers and under-tens have increased access to “violent pornography and indecent images of children”.

He said it would “provide a greater evidence base allowing us to better understand the impact violent pornography is having on the behaviour of young people and adults who continue to pose the greatest risk of harm to children”.

Baroness Bertin is expected to publish her findings later this year.

Child abuse

Earlier this month, it was revealed that more than half of child abuse cases in England and Wales are now committed by other children.

The National Analysis of Police-Recorded Child Sexual Abuse & Exploitation Report found that 52 per cent of 106,984 offences recorded by 42 police forces in 2022 were committed by ten to 17-year-olds, at an average age of 14.

The report called it a “growing and concerning trend (previously thought to be a third) involving a wide range of offending” from sharing indecent images to rape.

Republican Attacks On LGBTQ+

"It is time to advocate for the real needs of our students and to stop playing politics," says Democratic Rep. Mark Takano of California.

By Mark Takano

I’m a former teacher and an openly gay man. Before I ever stepped foot in the halls of Congress, I spent the 1980s and 90s working in California public schools, and I can tell you: we’ve been here before. What Republicans are trying to do to our students and public education will send us back 40 years.

When I began my career in the 80s, California was just a few years out from a defeat of the Briggs Initiative — a piece of state legislation that would have banned all openly gay and lesbian teachers from working in California public schools. I was a high school student when that proposition was debated and listened to state legislators talk about how such a ban was necessary to “defend our children.” They claimed that the presence of LGBTQI+ teachers and the mere discussion of LGBTQI+ topics was an effort to “recruit” children into the “homosexual lifestyle.”

In the four decades since we’ve come a long way with LGBTQI+ rights – but the rhetoric is just the same as it was 40 years ago. Today, in a frenzied effort to create new culture wars targeting the LGBTQI+ community, anti-equality politicians are staking the health, well-being, and safety of our educators and our children on their messaging campaigns.

More specifically, anti-equality Republicans are asking families, teachers, and students to carry the cost of their political gain and turning a blind eye to the myriad of other consequences that will come from enacting anti-LGBTQI+ laws through Congress in addition to the legislation sweeping through state legislatures.

As we approach Harvey Milk Day this month – named in honor of an LGBTQI+ civil rights hero that spearheaded the charge to defeat the Briggs Initiative – I’ve been thinking about a quote of his from the campaign against the anti-gay laws that swept the country in the 1970s:

Once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake. For the sake of the youngsters who are becoming scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene

Openly LGBTQI+ role models are far more numerous today than when I first began teaching, and our language is constantly expanding to describe the beautiful array of identities and experiences that exist. Educators, parents, and community advocates are publishing books that help LGBTQI+ kids see themselves represented, educate their peers, and put tools in the hands of teachers.

At the same time -- and likely directly in response to this progress -- I listen to my colleagues use their platform in the House of Representatives to use the same tactics that State Senator John Briggs tried back in the 1970s: using fear to whip up a moral panic for political gain.

In the first education-related bill that the Republicans have brought to the Floor this Congress, they chose to use committee time and taxpayer dollars to pass H.R. 5, the “Parents Bill of Rights,” through the House of Representatives, a bill which opens the door to book bans and would require schools to forcibly out trans youth, even if it puts them in harm’s way. In the name of preserving the rights of a small but vocal minority of parents, H.R. 5 places further bureaucratic burdens on teachers and further marginalizes an already vulnerable group of students.

As a teacher, I can tell you the cost of these kinds of insidious measures on children.

When I was training to be a teacher in the late 80s, I remember the vicious and relentless bullying that a transgender student of mine went through. I know of instances where students were outed by staff and faced severe punishment at home. Later in my career, I learned of one student who was viciously beaten by his father and transferred out of the district after his family was informed that he had been caught being physically affectionate with another boy.

As a Member of Congress, it’s my job to support the most vulnerable members of our community. We must focus on making our children feel safe and supported so that they can reach their fullest potential. We must tackle the crises in our education systems that threaten safety and support in our schools including underresourced teachers, the youth mental health crisis, gun violence, and gaps in educational equity. As a member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and a Co-Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, I will continue to use my position to do just that.

It is time to advocate for the real needs of our students and to stop playing politics. Politicians with a platform, teachers with lived experience, activists brave enough to speak out, and those who fight for full equality in this country must speak up.

LGBTQI+ students deserve to know that elected officials aren’t working against them, but rather working to ensure they can be successful in the future.

I think about my former students all the time. I may no longer be their teacher, but I’ll never stop fighting in the halls of Congress for their right to receive an education in a safe and affirming environment. -Advocate 

Rep. Mark Takano, a Democrat from California representing the state's 39th district, is co-chair of the Equality Caucus.

History Of Book Burning

By Brad Dress

Local and state GOP leaders are mobilizing across the country to ban books, many of which deal with racial politics or the LGBTQ community.

The nonprofit free expression organization Pen America estimated in April that since 2021, more than 1,500 books have been banned in 86 school districts across 26 states.

The censorship efforts have now gained the attention of Congress, which held its second hearing on the issue last week, as well as more than 1,300 children’s book authors who signed a letter to lawmakers warning of a “dehumanizing form of erasure.”

While the bans mark a new trend, there is a long history of trying to erase unpopular or allegedly offensive literature.

History tells us that banning books in certain situations often leads to more drastic efforts to restrict access to them, said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America.

“It’s very clear to anybody involved in this that it always seems to start with just a few books in school, but then all of a sudden we’re talking about not just public schools but public libraries,” Friedman said.

“When you look across the landscape of the country in the past few months, we see a lot of different censorship taking place, and any of them could continue to be mimicked or scaled up,” he continued.

Throwing books into a raging bonfire likely won’t happen in the 21st Century — although one Tennessee lawmaker recently said he would “burn ’em,” when asked what he personally would do with books he objected to.

But Friedman told The Hill that “censorship begets censorship.”

Bills creating state-authorized committees to review and decide on what types of books are stacked on library shelves are already in the pipeline, while censorship also weighs on the country’s writers and impacts the type of work they produce, he added.

Here’s what history tells us about book censorships and the targeted burnings of literary and religious works.

Book burning in the ancient world

Book burning has often been tied to conquest and imperial governing. The first emperor of China orchestrated the first known recorded instance of government-sanctioned book burnings in 213 B.C.

Qin Shi Huang wanted history to begin with him, hence his designation of himself as the first emperor of China despite his known predecessors. Naturally, books offered a competing narrative.

When his chancellor Li Si suggested burning all books except the official history of the Qin state, Shi Huang readily agreed. During his book burning campaign, the emperor also infamously ordered the deaths of hundreds of Confucian scholars, who were buried alive.

The Roman Empire burned up countless books over the course of its long reign. The first emperor, Augustus — objecting to books of “prophesies and destinies” — ordered more than 2,000 books to be reduced to smoke and ashes, according to “Book Burning” by Haig A. Bosmajian.

One of the greatest losses of literature was at the Library of Alexandria, established under Alexander the Great in northern Egypt around 331 BC. The library was burned down at least three times over hundreds of years and is now permanently erased.

At one point, the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from multiple nations, including present-day Syria, Greece, Persia, Egypt and India.

The Muslim ruler Caliph Umar took over the city of Alexandria in 640 AD and dealt the library a final blow, reportedly using its contents as tinder for the city’s bathhouses, according to Mid-Content Public Library.

According to some accounts, Umar said the works “either contradict the Qur’an, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.”

Book burning in the post-Roman Empire

Religion played a major role in some of the largest book burning events after the Roman Empire began to decline around 500 AD.

In the late 15th century, the Italian and Dominican preacher and religious reformist Girolamo Savonarola helped drive the Medici family out of the city of Florence and established a new government.

In what became known as a “bonfire of the vanities,” Savonarola oversaw a literal bonfire containing books, pictures, jewelry, clothing, paintings and anything else he collected from residents of the city and found objectionable.

The Catholic Church organized numerous book burnings throughout the medieval period. In the 13th century, Pope Gregory IX ordered the burning of the Jewish theological work The Talmud along with “those books in which you find errors of this sort you shall cause to be burned at the stake,” according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

As a consequence of the order, 24 wagonloads containing thousands of volumes were burned in France in 1242.

Works of religion were frequent targets by the Catholic Church. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V joined others in burning and censoring works from the theologian Martin Luther, whose teachings paved the way for Protestantism.

Other book burning or censorship campaigns were waged by Pope John XXII, Pope Adrian VI and King Henry VIII, among many other leaders during the medieval period who targeted literature and religious works they disagreed with.

Book burning and censorship in the modern world

As the world entered the 20th century, book burning was largely frowned upon. But plenty of instances of mass censorship and the permanent erasure of works still occurred.

Nazi Germany’s incineration of 25,000 “un-German” works on May 10, 1933, is perhaps the most infamous book burning event because photos and videos of the event can still be seen today.

Mao Zedong, the Communist leader in China, burned works and books during his Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, a campaign of censorship continued by the current Chinese government. In 2002, Radio Free Asia reported that thousands of books from the predominately Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority were burned. The Uyghurs continue to be subjected to detention camps in Xinjiang today.

A Sinhalese Buddhist mob torched 95,000 volumes from the Jaffna Public Library in Sri Lanka in 1981.

From 1955 to 1971, thousands of books and works were burned by the South African government during apartheid, according to the University of Pretoria.

Major book burning events have occurred in the past two decades as well.

In Bosnia, 2 million books were said to have been burned by Serbian nationalists in 1992. In Timbuktu, Mali, ancient writings were put to the flame in 2013 by Islamist fighters.

And the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria burned down the Mosul University library in Iraq around 2015.

Censorship campaigns in the U.S.

The U.S. has struggled with censorship before. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series has long been targeted for supposedly promoting witchcraft. Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novel “Slaughterhouse Five,” the Qur’an and even records from The Beatles have also been burned and banned by individual actors or groups.

But the number of book bans in the U.S. today is unprecedented, said Friedman from Pen America. The researcher said since his April report, at least 200 more books have been banned in states across the country.

“There are lists of books being shared around the country and communities of people are being encouraged to ban those lists,” Friedman said. “I think those lists are more extensive than anything we’ve seen before.” -The Hill