Tag: political right
Milo Rau, the Theater Director Who Likes to Go Too Far
“I would not say that my art is dark,” Milo Rau tells me, and I burst out laughing. We are sitting in the office space of his theater in Ghent, Belgium, surrounded by posters of his work. In the past decade, Rau has directed plays about a homophobic murder (La Reprise), the unexplained suicide of two parents and their children (Familie), and the exploitation of the developing world (The Congo Tribunal). The Swiss-born director’s
The Return of the Pagans
Take a close look at Donald Trump—the lavishness of his homes, the buildings emblazoned with his name and adorned with gold accoutrements, his insistent ego, even the degree of obeisance he evokes among his followers—and, despite the fervent support he receives from many evangelical Christians, it’s hard to avoid concluding that there’s something a little pagan about the man. Or consider Elon Musk. With his drive to conquer space to expand the human empire, his flirtation with anti-Semitic tropes, his
How Ivermectin Became a Belief System
Since fall 2021, Daniel Lemoi has been a central figure in the online community dedicated to experimental use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. “You guys all know I’m not a doctor,” he often reminded them. “I’m a guy that grew up on a farm. I ran equipment all my life. I live on a dirt road and I drive an old truck—a 30-year-old truck. I’m just one of you.” Lemoi’s folksy Rhode Island accent, his avowed regular-guy-ness, and his refusal
Conspiratorial Thinking Is an American Disease
As an American living in Britain for the past decade, I’ve had a front-row seat to two dysfunctional democracies hell-bent on embarrassing themselves. President Donald Trump warned that a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Prime Minister Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce at Downing Street. These years have not inspired confidence in democracy.
In Britain and the United States—and across most faltering Western democracies—this democratic dysfunction is routinely chalked up
Why Are So Many Black Men Shot in New Haven?
We are all products of our environments. This familiar phrase assumes that most of us spent our youth in one neighborhood, one delimited world. But I came of age in between spaces—a white kid with a single mother who filled my life with books and worried about making her salary last the month, and a father with severe mental illness in and out of institutions, I spent my adolescent nights on a rented floor of a two-family house and
How Republicans Can Win on Immigration
The conservative intelligentsia is in the grip of a profound demographic pessimism—a sense that a diversifying America necessarily spells doom for the right, and that the movement’s only hope is therefore to halt, or at least sharply reduce, immigrant inflows. Portents of demographic doom have long been a mainstay of conservative media, whether on the Fox News prime-time lineup or in highbrow journals of opinion, and embracing restrictionism has become a surefire way for ambitious Republicans to signal their edginess