In Lieu of Fun

You know my colleague Anna Bower as a fabulous courts reporter and chronicler of the Trump Trials. But Anna has a secret, second life: She is also crazed Swifty. And she's here to talk about the emerging fight between the Swifties and the Trumpists.

Actually, he doesn't. We don't even talk all that much about eating cats, but it makes a good episode title.

Wherein we are joined by convicted insurrectionist Katsiaryna Shmatsina. The estimable Ms. Shmatsina recently had the distinction of being tried in absentia in her native Belarus of trying to overturn that country's oh-so-very-democratic election and was sentenced to ten years in prison. She wrote about the experience on Lawfare and discussed it with me on the Lawfare podcast. She joins from her on-the-run secret on-the-lam location. Be careful, she might convert you to a life a crime!

On the inaugural episode of #DogShirtTV, the estimable Charlie Sykes joins Benjamin Wittes, Alicia Wanless, and Genevieve DellaFera to talk about the political conventions, the new energy in the Democratic Party, his memories of the 1968 Chicago convention, and fresh water sharks.

On the evening of Jan. 22, 2024, at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED conference in Miami, Florida, In Lieu of Fun made a brief comeback for a live event. Kate flew in from Paris. Guests included Renee DiResta and Katie Harbath. The subject was election integrity in 2024. The audience participated. Scotch was consumed. Hilarity ensued.

In this episode of #DogShirtTV: #BookShirts, we discuss Yascha Mounk's s new book, "The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time."Publisher's Description:For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It stifles discourse, vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another, and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin.This, Yascha Mounk argues, is the identity trap. Though those who battle for these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve progress toward the genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn of the risks right-wing populists pose to American democracy. But, he shows, those on the left and center who are stuck in the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement.In The Identity Trap, Mounk provides the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called “wokeness.” He is the first to show how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis” that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive—and why universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality. In explaining the huge political and cultural transformations of the past decade, The Identity Trap provides truth and clarity where they are needed most.

Author Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses her book, "Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall"Publisher's Description:Ours is the age of the strongman. Russia, India, Turkey and America are ruled by men who, as they have risen to the top, have reshaped their countries around them, creating cults of personality which earn the loyalty of millions. And as they do so, they draw on a playbook of behaviour established by figures such as Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi and Adolf Hitler.Here, political historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat draws on analysis of everything from gender and sexuality to diplomatic strategy to explain who these political figures are - and how they manipulate our own history, fears and desires in search of power at any cost.

In this episode of #DogShirtTV: Book Shirts, we discuss Kristin Kobes Du Mez on "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation."Publisher's Description:Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism―or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex?and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes?mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have utterly remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.