Protest Leaders Quotes

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of the faith is being jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity. Let ragamuffins everywhere gather as a confessing Church to cry out in protest. Revoke the licenses of religious leaders who falsify the idea of God. Sentence them to three years in solitude with the Bible as their only companion.

He took over, and he said: 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.'" - Recalling how former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dealt with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests

The revolution has no leader, I said. It was more like a raging wild horse that would buck anyone who tried to mount it against its will.

In a letter, Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, wrote to Hans von Rechenberg in 1522 about the possibility that people could turn to God after death, asking: "Who would doubt God's ability to do that?

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This [Northern conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.

This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch. Jack started to protest but the clamor changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart.

Beautiful, seamless upgrade from Twitter today, making functionality smoother and cooler. We didn't have to lobby, didn't have to beg, didn't have to elect a new leader, didn't have to push or protest. Progress is built in to the structure of the mechanism itself: this company exists to please you and me. This is a far better system than any political system on earth.

Violent crackdowns against unarmed protests end up exposing the brutality of a ruling force, undermining its legitimacy, and, in many cases, creating wider public unwillingness to cooperate with its mandates. Niccolò Machiavelli recognized this dynamic as early as the 1500s. Of the leader who seeks to impose his rule on a mass of hostile people, he wrote: “the greater his cruelty, the weaker does his regime become.

People frequently lie—to themselves and to others. In 2008, Americans told surveys that they no longer cared about race. Eight years later, they elected as president Donald J. Trump, a man who retweeted a false claim that black people are responsible for the majority of murders of white Americans, defended his supporters for roughing up a Black Lives Matters protester at one of his rallies, and hesitated in repudiating support from a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The same hidden racism that hurt Barack Obama helped Donald Trump.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

It is shown all throughout history how black women are constantly out here on the front lines, yet we are treated as disposable. We are at the planning tables. We are creating real solutions. We are confronting the police. We are challenging the status quo. We have your backs during protest and outside of protest. But, if y'all don't have us... then who does?

After September 11, some critics even tried to lump the antiglobalization protesters in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible destabilizers of the world order. But the protesters are the children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naive in their analysis, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaderes apparently lack that globalization's current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence.

As the 1990s began, the right stayed angry and upset and kept growing in size and power thanks to the primitives, the bigots, the Protestant fundamentalists and cowboy commando conspiracy fantasists. But the grown-ups on the right, the economic right, corporate leaders and the rest of the rich, kept their eye on the prize—less taxation, less regulation of business, greed is good—and they maintained control of the party.

My army cries in protest. They don’t understand. Golds don’t do this. Golds don’t sacrifice for one another. Leaders take; they do not give. My army cries out again. I ask them, how is this worse than the rape they were all so comfortable with? Is not Nyla now one of us? Is she not part of the body? Like Reds are. Like Obsidians are. Like all the Colors are. Pax tries to go light. But it’s Pax, so when he’s done, my back looks like chewed goatmeat. I stand up. Do everything I can to prevent myself from wobbling. I’m seeing stars. I want to wail. Want to cry. Instead, I tell them that anyone who does anything vile—they know what I mean—will have to whip me like this in front of the entire army. I see how they look at Tactus now, how they look at Pax, how they look at my back. “You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is. You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going. I do.” I motion Tactus to come toward me. He wavers, pale, confused as a newborn lamb. Fear marks his face. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the pain I willingly bore. Fear when he realizes how different he is from me. “Don’t be afraid,” I tell him. I pull him forward into a hug. “We are blood brothers, you little shit. Blood brothers.” I’m learning.

Younger managers learn quickly that, whatever the public protestations to the contrary, bosses generally want pliable and agreeable subordinates, especially during periods of crisis. Clique leaders want dependable, loyal allies. Thos who regularly raise objections to what a boss or a clique leader really desires run the risk of being considered problems themselves and of being labeled "outspoken," or "nonconstructive," or "doomsayers," "naysayers," or "crepehangers.

I stood backstage watching the words roll on the teleprompter. In just two months, the world had turned upside down. We’d seen a regime fall in Tunisia, broken from a longtime U.S. ally in Egypt, and intervened in Libya. History, it seemed, was turning in the direction of young people in the streets, and we had placed the United States of America on their side. Where this drama would turn next was uncertain—protests were already rattling a monarch in Bahrain, a corrupt leader in Yemen, a strongman in Syria.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Many of our white brothers misunderstand this fact because many of them fail to interpret correctly the nature of the Negro Revolution. Some believe that it is the work of skilled agitators who have the power to raise or lower the floodgates at will. Such a movement, maneuverable by a talented few, would not be a genuine revolution. This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals--the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations. In this time and circumstance, no leader or set of leaders could have acted as ringmasters, whipping a whole race out of purring contentment into leonine courage and action. If such credit is to be given to any single group, it might well go to the segregationists, who, with their callous and cynical code, helped to arouse and ignite the righteous wrath of the Negro.

Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.” Socialism,

Tellingly, Ball reported that the BLM riots were a key part of their effort to impact the election, as the leaders of these groups “drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance.

In the prologue, I explained the gradual and subtle process in which history is re-written to fit a country's present self-image. As a result, many rich-country people recommend free-trade, free-market policies in the honest belief that these are policies that thier own ancestors used in order to make their countries rich. When the poor countries protest that those policies hurt, those protests are dismissed as being intellectually misguided or as serving the interests of their corrupt leaders. It never occurs to those Bad Samaritans that the policies they recommend are fundamentally at odds with what history teaches us to be the best development policies. The intention behind their policy recommendations may be honourable, but their effects are no less harmful than those from policy recommendations motivated by deliberate ladder-kicking.

After the opposition had failed to negotiate us into a compromise, it turned to subtler means for blocking the protest; namely, to conquer by dividing. False rumors were spread concerning the leaders of the movement. Negro workers were told by their white employers that their leaders were only concerned with making money out of the movement. Others were told that the Negro leaders rode big cars while they walked. During this period the rumor was spread that I had purchased a brand new Cadillac for myself and a Buick station wagon for my wife. Of course none of this was true.

Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of “prayer”, as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not: At any rate they do require standing in a crowd and uttering constant and uniform incantations. This is ordered by one religion to take place five times a day, and by other monotheists for almost that number, while all of them set aside at least one whole day for the exclusive praise of the Lord, and Judaism seems to consist in its original constitution of a huge list of prohibitions that must be followed before all else. The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not making him into a woman (or a Gentile), while the Jewish woman contents herself with thanking the almighty for creating her “as she is.” Presumably the almighty is pleased to receive this tribute to his power and the approval of those he created. It’s just that, if he is truly almighty, the achievement would seem rather a slight one. Much the same applies to the idea that prayer, instead of making Christianity look foolish, makes it appear convincing. Now, it can be asserted with some confidence, first, that its deity is all–wise and all–powerful and, second, that its congregants stand in desperate need of that deity’s infinite wisdom and power. Just to give some elementary quotations, it is stated in the book of Philippians, 4:6, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that “he is the rock, his work is perfect,” and Isaiah 64:8 tells us, “Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Note, then, that Christianity insists on the absolute dependence of its flock, and then only on the offering of undiluted praise and thanks. A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or, at the very least, a pathetic misunderstanding. It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine. And this, sad to say, opens religion to the additional charge of corruption. The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment. Eventually, and after a bitter and schismatic quarrel, practices like the notorious “sale of indulgences” were abandoned. But many a fine basilica or chantry would not be standing today if this awful violation had not turned such a spectacularly good profit. And today it is easy enough to see, at the revival meetings of Protestant fundamentalists, the counting of the checks and bills before the laying on of hands by the preacher has even been completed. Again, the spectacle is a shameless one.

However, the pro–civil rights orientation of white mainline Protestant and white Catholic leaders is not an accurate barometer of the influence of white supremacy among white Christians sitting in the pews. Declarations on racial justice by national institutions and hierarchies were more often than not ignored or actively flouted by local clergy and their congregations.

Almost no one tolerates the exclusivity and supremacy of Christ these days, even some who profess to be Christians. The message of the cross is not politically correct—it’s the singularity of the gospel, on top of everything else, that bothers people. Can you imagine for a moment what might happen if a celebrity or political leader just said, “I’m a Christian and if you’re not, you’re going to hell”? Yikes! And then imagine if he said, “All the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and all the people who believe they can earn salvation, whether liberal Protestants or Roman Catholics, and all the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses—you’re all going to eternal hell. But I care about you so much, I want to give you the gospel of Jesus Christ, because it is far more important than wars in the Middle East, terrorism, or any domestic policy.” You can’t be faithful and popular, so take your pick.

That day was a turning point. The Black Lives Matter movement was a popular protest against rising authoritarianism, and two thirds of adult Americans supported it. But while Republican lawmakers remained silent, the events of June 1 made former political leaders (including all four living presidents), more than 1,250 former members of the Department of Justice, Democratic lawmakers, and, crucially, military leaders take a stand against Trump.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Celler pressed him on theological details that were only vaguely addressed in the amendment: “Would a Protestant child be taught papal infallibility? Would a Catholic boy or girl be required to listen to divine instruction from the Torah? Might Mohammedan parents insist their child be taught the scriptures of the Koran?” In an unusual statement for an evangelical leader, Cook dismissed those concerns, claiming that there was really “not that much difference” among the texts used in the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.

None of them was impressed with Gravel, who at present was their commander. He had, in their eyes, failed them. He had sent Meadows and Downs out on missions that were foredoomed. It wasn’t all his fault, because he was getting pushed around from above, and he had complained about it bitterly and consistently. But part of being a leader was being able to push up as well as down. You didn’t ask men to risk everything on a mission that you did not believe in yourself. Gravel had been doing this now for several days. The men knew when they were being misused. This was the real deal, not some classroom exercise. These were blood decisions. They were the most important ones a military commander is asked to make. If you knew more because of where you were and what you saw, then you stood your ground. You didn’t just protest; if need be, you refused. You put your judgment on the line. This might destroy your career—hell, it would certainly destroy your career—but you accepted that, because whatever happened to you, your career, your reputation, these were minor things by comparison. Lives were at stake. A real leader knew his responsibility was not first and foremost to himself; it was to his men, and the mission. What mattered in combat, what really mattered, was not only understanding why you asked men to risk their lives, but making them understand. Men would willingly risk their lives, but they needed to know that it counted. And they needed to know they had a chance. If the commander believed those things himself, he could convince his men. The problem here was that neither the young company commanders nor Gravel held that belief.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” “Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

We need to stop expecting Eurocentric veganism to correct systemic racism. We need to let the oppressed folks articulate their own movements using their own voices. The self-proclaimed leaders need to stop trying to find their next Martin Luther King Jr. to manipulate black folks into being calm and “civilized” since what Ron and other guerrilla gardeners are doing has nothing to do with being peaceful and everything to do with survival and protest. Black folks who are vegan are a threat to white supremacy, not a subset of the depoliticized white-vegan movement.

The difference between a monarch and a dictator is that the monarchical succession is defined by law and the dictatorial succession is defined by power. The effect in the latter is that the fish rots from the head down — lawlessness permeates the state, as in a mafia family, because contending leaders must build informal coalitions. Since another name for a monarchist is a legitimist, we can contrast the legitimist and demotist theories of government. […] Perhaps unsurprisingly, I see legitimism as a sort of proto-formalism. The royal family is a perpetual corporation, the kingdom is the property of this corporation, and the whole thing is a sort of real-estate venture on a grand scale. Why does the family own the corporation and the corporation own the kingdom? Because it does. Property is historically arbitrary. The best way for the monarchies of Old Europe to modernize, in my book, would have been to transition the corporation from family ownership to shareholder ownership, eliminating the hereditary principle which caused so many problems for so many monarchies. However, the trouble with corporate monarchism is that it presents no obvious political formula. “Because it does” cuts no ice with a mob of pitchfork-wielding peasants. […] So the legitimist system went down another path, which led eventually to its destruction: the path of divine-right monarchy. When everyone believes in God, “because God says so” is a much more impressive formula. Perhaps the best way to look at demotism is to see it as the Protestant version of rule by divine right — based on the theory of vox populi, vox dei. If you add divine-right monarchy to a religious system that is shifting from the worship of God to the worship of Man, demotism is pretty much what you’d expect to precipitate in the beaker.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One must keep winning elections to defend the gains that social movements have contributed to. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today. Given the Republicans’ rage for destruction, it is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women, and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up, and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress . .

And while the most desperate hours of the men within the Perimeter were passing, a second battle had been raging in their rear, back in the continental United States. When American soldiers went into action, it had become customary to provide them with a free issue of candy, cigarettes—and beer. In the places American troops fought, there were rarely any handy taverns or supermarkets. Reported to the home front, the “beer issue” rapidly became a national controversy. Temperance, church, and various civic groups bombarded the Pentagon and Congress with howls of protest against the corruption of American youth. One legislator, himself a man who took a brew now and then, tried a flanking attack against the complainers, saying on the floor of the House, “Water in Korea is more deadly than bullets!” But no one either polled the troops for their opinion or said openly that a man who was old enough to kill and be killed was also old enough to have a beer if he wanted it. Unable to shake the habit of acquiescence, the Army leaders bowed to the storm of public wrath. On 12 September the day the 3rd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, lost half its strength securing Hill 314, Far East Command cut off its beer ration. The troops could still buy beer, but only when and if the PX caught up with them.

But he also felt a stitch of hesitation. Did God put him in the same room with Rabin so that he could eliminate the Israeli leader and his Oslo process? Or would Amir be imposing his own plan on God? He thought about the bullets in his magazine, the hollow points and the regular rounds. Then he turned his gaze back to Rabin and watched him leave the hall; Amir had missed his chance. But he gleaned valuable information. Rabin was hardly protected. If protests didn’t stop the peace process, killing him might be a viable alternative. At home, he related the events to Hagai. It was too early, he told his brother. He needed to build his inner readiness.

The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both "the white race" and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation. Both the informal conduits of white power, such as the White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, and the state and local government offices, were populated by pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other upstanding members of prominent white churches. The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental; these religious connections served as the moral underpinning for the entire project of protecting the dominant social and political standing of whites.

The theologically backed assertion of the superiority of both “the white race” and Protestant Christianity undergirded a century of religiously sanctioned terrorism in the form of ritualized lynchings and other forms of public violence and intimidation. Both the informal conduits of white power, such as the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, and the state and local government offices, were populated by pastors, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and other upstanding members of prominent white churches. The link between political leaders and prominent white churches was not just incidental; these religious connections served as the moral underpinning for the entire project of protecting the dominant social and political standing of whites.

A majority of colonial Americans were either Protestants or unaffiliated with any church. However, many of the leaders of the American Revolution and signers of its Constitution such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were Deists, along with James Madison, John Adams, and possibly Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Alexander Hamilton. Most Deists believed in a supreme being who had created the universe along with the natural laws that governed it, but who then took a relatively hands-off approach to human affairs. The supreme being of the Deists could be apprehended by practical investigation and the use of reason to understand natural laws. Religious faith was not needed, nor were miracles, divine inspiration, or personal revelations of God’s spirit.

the victims chosen by the mobs at the time of the Stamp Act were struck not simply because they supported or were presumed to support English policy. Such men as Andrew Oliver, Jared Ingersoll, and in particular Thomas Hutchinson represented a dangerous moral order. In attacking them, and others like them, the mobs not only defended political liberty in America but also virtue and morality. The mobs and no doubt popular leaders as well acted in the belief that they faced an unqualified evil. The Devil’s specter had been summoned up in the denunciation of the stamp men. Protestant concerns and mental patterns had fostered an exaggerated clarity of morality and immorality, thereby heightening the emotional receptivity to fear of unseen, utterly evil forces.

Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger. It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across the streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept. It read: THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.

More politically, Medusa has become shorthand for a particular brand of strong female agency perceived as aggressive or ‘unladylike’. Marie Antoinette was depicted with snake-like hair in French seventeenth-century cartoons, while in the early twentieth century, anti-suffragette postcards likened the protesters to the monster. During the 2016 American election campaign, the image of Hillary Clinton’s snake-bedecked, raging head being cut off by her Republican rival Donald Trump – compared to Perseus – appeared on unofficial merchandise. Similarly, another strong female leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel, has found herself depicted as a Gorgon. These portrayals reinforce a millennia-old message from men to women: keep your mouth shut or we’ll shut it for you.

Through the fall, the president’s anger seemed difficult to contain. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” then followed up with a threat to “totally destroy” the country. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them killed a protester and injured a score of others, he made a brutally offensive statement condemning violence “on many sides … on many sides”—as if there was moral equivalence between those who were fomenting racial hatred and violence and those who were opposing it. He retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda that had been posted by a convicted criminal leader of a British far-right organization. Then as now, the president’s heedless bullying and intolerance of variance—intolerance of any perception not his own—has been nurturing a strain of insanity in public dialogue that has been long in development, a pathology that became only more virulent when it migrated to the internet. A person such as the president can on impulse and with minimal effort inject any sort of falsehood into public conversation through digital media and call his own lie a correction of “fake news.” There are so many news outlets now, and the competition for clicks is so intense, that any sufficiently outrageous statement made online by anyone with even the faintest patina of authority, and sometimes even without it, will be talked about, shared, and reported on, regardless of whether it has a basis in fact. How do you progress as a culture if you set out to destroy any common agreement as to what constitutes a fact? You can’t have conversations. You can’t have debates. You can’t come to conclusions. At the same time, calling out the transgressor has a way of giving more oxygen to the lie. Now it’s a news story, and the lie is being mentioned not just in some website that publishes unattributable gossip but in every reputable newspaper in the country. I have not been looking to start a personal fight with the president. When somebody insults your wife, your instinctive reaction is to want to lash out in response. When you are the acting director, or deputy director, of the FBI, and the person doing the insulting is the chief executive of the United States, your options have guardrails. I read the president’s tweets, but I had an organization to run. A country to help protect. I had to remain independent, neutral, professional, positive, on target. I had to compartmentalize my emotions. Crises taught me how to compartmentalize. Example: the Boston Marathon bombing—watching the video evidence, reviewing videos again and again of people dying, people being mutilated and maimed. I had the primal human response that anyone would have. But I know how to build walls around that response and had to build them then in order to stay focused on finding the bombers. Compared to experiences like that one, getting tweeted about by Donald Trump does not count as a crisis. I do not even know how to think about the fact that the person with time on his hands to tweet about me and my wife is the president of the United States.

The Catholic Inquisition is well-known for its persecutions, but the Protestants were no better. An infamous example of Protestant evil, an example given by Thomas Jefferson, is the execution of Michael Servetus. A Spanish physician, Servetus wrote that the doctrine of the Trinity makes no sense, that it contradicts the idea that there is only one God. Servetus was condemned to die by the Catholic Inquisition, but he wasn't present, so they couldn't kill him. He had fled to Protestant Switzerland, expecting to be protected there. Instead, the city leaders in Geneva, with the approval of John Calvin (one of the great fathers of Protestant thought) and other Protestant leaders across Europe, had Servetus burned alive (with green wood to give him longer to repent) in 1553.

Washington is a city of spectacles. Every four years, imposing Presidential inaugurations attract the great and the mighty. Kings, prime ministers, heroes and celebrities of every description have been feted there for more than 150 years. But in its entire glittering history, Washington had never seen a spectacle of the size and grandeur that assembled there on August 28, 1963. Among the nearly 250,000 people who journeyed that day to the capital, there were many dignitaries and many celebrities, but the stirring emotion came from the mass of ordinary people who stood in majestic dignity as witnesses to their single-minded determination to achieve democracy in their time. They came from almost every state in the union; they came in every form of transportation; they gave up from one to three days' pay plus the cost of transportation, which for many was a heavy financial sacrifice. They were good-humored and relaxed, yet disciplined and thoughtful. They applauded their leaders generously, but the leaders, in their own hearts, applauded their audience. Many a Negro speaker that day had his respect for his own people deepened as he felt the strength of their dedication. The enormous multitude was the living, beating heart of an infinitely noble movement. It was an army without guns, but not without strength. It was an army into which no one had to be drafted. It was white and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love.

Imagine us saying to children: "In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these rules calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions." Well, there it is. ...It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them? I can think of only one - America in that heady period of the Gettysburg Address. And that time could not have survived the Civil War, for when war starts, countries cannot afford disinterested examination of their behaviour. When a war starts, nations go mad - and have to go mad, in order to survive. ...I am not talking of the aptitudes for killing, for destruction, which soldiers are taught as part of their training, but a kind of atmosphere, the invisible poison, which spreads everywhere. And then people everywhere begin behaving as they never could in peace-time. Afterwards we look back, amazed. Did I really do that? Believe that? Fall for that bit of propaganda? Think that all our enemies were evil? That all our own nation's acts were good? How could I have tolerated that state of mind, day after day, month after month - perpetually stimulated, perpetually whipped up into emotions that my mind was meanwhile quietly and desperately protesting against?

Around the same time that Goldwater lost his bid for the presidency, the TV evangelicals Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell joined the libertarian, far-right wing of the Republican Party. They called for free markets and cited Hayek and Friedman to protest government bureaucrats, while also issuing daily denunciations of rock music, homosexuals, abortion, civil rights, and pornography. Hard-right evangelicals were among the most influential leaders of the new free-market movement. The Republican Party became an ideological mix of the mainline northeastern establishment, American Baptist puritanism, racism and bigotry, and a Friedmanesque and American Southwest individualist libertarianism and permissiveness—all held together by a near-religious reverence for the multinational conglomerate firm and the sanctity of capital-holding shareholders.

Har Homa was in the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem drawn right after the Six-Day War. Israel never accepted any formal limitation on building neighborhoods within these boundaries, including under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the decision to build Har Homa was met with severe Palestinian and international censure. Arafat demanded that I rescind the authorization. I did not. As usual, loud protests ensued. The British foreign minister, Jack Straw, visiting Israel, literally joined hands with the Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini in a Palestinian march condemning the Har Homa project. He was supposed to have dinner with me that evening. I promptly canceled it. For me, I said, that was the last straw. The protests eventually died down; the Palestinian southern thrust into Jerusalem was blunted. Today Har Homa has forty thousand residents, a small city within a city.

The following year Carmichael began a campaign to promote armed warfare in American cities and was briefly made "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party for his efforts. Ever the racist, Carmichael tried to persuade the Panthers to break off their alliances with whites, but failed. This led to his expulsion from the party and a ritual beating administered by his former comrades. Shortly thereafter, Carmichael left the United States for Africa. In Africa, he changed his name to Kwame Ture, thereby honoring two dictators (Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure) who caused untold misery to their own peoples. He took up residence as the personal guest of the sadistic Toure, Guinea's paranoid dictator, whose reputation was built on the torture-murders of thousands of his African subjects. Some 250,000 Guineans were driven into exile during Carmichael's stay there, without a protest from this New Left leader.

The fact is that society produces very many persons fit for “the cause”, but we are unable to make use of them all. The critical, transitional state of our movement in this respect may be formulated as follows: There are no people — yet there is a mass of people. There is a mass of people, because the working class and increasingly varied social strata, year after year, produce from their ranks an increasing number of discontented people who desire to protest, who are ready to render all the assistance they can in the struggle against absolutism, the intolerableness of which, though not yet recognised by all, is more and more acutely sensed by increasing masses of the people. At the same time, we have no people, because we have no leaders, no political leaders, no talented organisers capable of arranging. extensive and at the same time uniform and harmonious work that would employ all forces, even the most inconsiderable.

The emphasis here will be on strength, not pathology; on challenge, not comfort; on self-differentiation, not herding for togetherness. This is a difficult perspective to maintain in a “seatbelt society” more oriented toward safety than adventure. This book is not, therefore, for those who prefer peace to progress. It is not for those who mistake another’s well-defined stand for coercion. It is not for those who fail to see how in any family or institution a perpetual concern for consensus leverages power to the extremists. And it is not for those who lack the nerve to venture out of the calm eye of good feelings and togetherness and weather the storm of protest that inevitably surrounds a leader’s self-definition. For, whether we are considering a family, a work system, or an entire nation, the resistance that sabotages a leader’s initiative usually has less to do with the “issue” that ensues than with the fact that the leader took initiative.

With extraordinary bravery, civil rights leaders, activists, and progressive clergy launched boycotts, marches, and sit-ins protesting the Jim Crow system. They endured fire hoses, police dogs, bombings, and beatings by white mobs, as well as by the police. Once again, federal troops were sent to the South to provide protection for blacks attempting to exercise their civil rights, and the violent reaction of white racists was met with horror in the North. The dramatic high point of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in 1963. The Southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating peacefully at one lunch counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century. Between autumn 1961 and the spring of 1963, twenty thousand men, women, and children had been arrested. In 1963 alone, another fifteen thousand were imprisoned, and one thousand desegregation protests occurred across the region, in more than one hundred cities.32

The New York Times tells us change is necessary and protest desirable, but within limits. Poverty should be protested, but the laws should not be broken. Hence, the Poor People’s Campaign, occupying tents in Washington in the spring of 1968, is praiseworthy; but its leader, Ralph Abernathy, is deservedly jailed for violating an ordinance against demonstrating near the Capitol. The Vietnam war is wrong, but if Dr. Spock is found by a jury and judge to have violated the draft law, he must accept his punishment as right because that is the rule of the game. Thus, exactly at that moment when we have begun to suspect that law is congealed injustice, that the existing order hides an everyday violence against body and spirit, that our political structure is fossilized, and that the noise of change—however scary—may be necessary, a cry rises for “law and order.” Such a moment becomes a crucial test of whether the society will sink back to a spurious safety or leap forward to its own freshening. We

... she just had time to reflect that of all the many ways in which she had anticipated her final moments, crashing airborne into a pack of flying wolves seemed least likely... Meanwhile the pack of flying wolves had noticed something unusual. 'What's that boss?' Said one of them, who was near the front. But their leader, Skoll, was too intent on opening his jaws wide enough to swallow the sun to hear. 'Looks like a flying pink poodle,' the wolf went on, and this time Skoll did hear. 'A flying pink poodle?' He said, with vast contempt. 'Give me a break Garm." 'No boss, look,' Garm protested. 'It is a flying pink poodle...' 'I told you what would happen if you didn't take your altitude tablets.' But by now the other wolves were joining in... Skoll heaved a sigh of absolute exasperation. 'First of all,' he said, 'poodles can't fly. And they ain't pink. I-oh.' For now that he had turned he could see Flo, careening erratically towards them upside down with her eyes firmly shut... He had become, over the millennia, almost jaded to novelty. But now he was genuinely astonished. 'Wow," he said.

In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate amount of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but they were generally peaceful and ineffective. (The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order.) A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America’s fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That

It’s easy for people in modern society to romanticize Indian life, and it might well have been easy for men like George as well. That impulse should be guarded against. Virtually all of the Indian tribes waged war against their neighbors and practiced deeply sickening forms of torture. Prisoners who weren’t tomahawked on the spot could expect to be disemboweled and tied to a tree with their own intestines or blistered to death over a slow fire or simply hacked to pieces and fed alive to the dogs. If there is any conceivable defense for such cruelty, it might be that in Europe at the time, the Spanish Inquisition was also busy serving up just as much barbarism on behalf of the Catholic Church. Infidels were regularly burned alive, broken on the rack, sawn in half lengthwise from the crotch, or impaled slowly on wooden stakes from the anus to the mouth. The Protestant Reformation changed a lot of things about Christianity but not its capacity for cruelty, and early Puritan leaders in New England were also renowned for their harsh justice. Cruelty, in other words, was very much the norm for that era, and the native tribes of North America were no exception.

If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation it must be by other means than any now being used. If the church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting. Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.

Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher and Reagan was to atomize and rule. Neoliberalism leads us to believe that relying on others is a sign of weakness, that we all are, or should be, ‘self-made’ men and women. But even the briefest glance at social outcomes shows that this cannot possibly be true. If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the ‘self-attribution fallacy’.10 This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you were not responsible. The same applies to the belief in personal failure that assails all too many at the bottom of the economic hierarchy today. From birth, this system of belief has been drummed into our heads: by government propaganda, by the billionaire media, through our educational system, by the boastful claims of the oligarchs and entrepreneurs we’re induced to worship. The doctrine has religious, quasi-Calvinist qualities: in the Kingdom of the Invisible Hand, the deserving and the undeserving are revealed through the grace bestowed upon them by the god of money. Any policy or protest that seeks to disrupt the formation of a ‘natural order’ of rich and poor is an unwarranted stay upon the divine will of the market. In school we’re taught to compete and are rewarded accordingly, yet our great social and environmental predicaments demand the opposite – the skill we most urgently need to learn is cooperation. We are set apart, and we suffer for it. A series of scientific papers suggest that social pain is processed11 by the same neural circuits as physical pain.12 This might explain why, in many languages, it is hard to describe the impact of breaking social bonds without the terms we use to denote physical pain and injury: ‘I was stung by his words’; ‘It was a massive blow’; ‘I was cut to the quick’; ‘It broke my heart’; ‘I was mortified’. In both humans and other social mammals, social contact reduces physical pain.13 This is why we hug our children when they hurt themselves: affection is a powerful analgesic.14 Opioids relieve both physical agony and the distress of separation. Perhaps this explains the link between social isolation and drug addiction.

But surely, say these good apostles, you aren't going to discredit reality in the eyes of those who already find it difficult enough to get by, and who surely have a right to reality and the fact that they exist? The same objection for the Third World: surely you aren't going to discredit affluence in the eyes of those dying of starvation? Or: surely you aren't going to run down the class struggle in the eyes of those who haven't even had their bourgeois revolution? Or again: you aren't going to discredit feminist and egalitarian demands in the eyes of all those who haven't even heard of women's rights, etc.? You may not like reality, but don't put others off it! It's a question of democratic morality: you must not demoralize the masses. You must never demoralize anyone. Underlying these charitable intentions is a profound contempt. First, in the fact of instating reality as a kind of life insurance or a burial plot held in perpetuity, as a kind of human right or consumer good. But, above all, in crediting people with placing their hope only in the visible proofs of their existence: by imputing this plaster-saint realism to them, one takes them for naive and feeble-minded. In their defence, it has to be said that the propagandists of reality vent that contempt on themselves first of all, reducing their own lives to an accumulation of facts and evidence, causes and effects. Well-ordered resentment always begins at home.

In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn; his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condition. Survey data reveal the stark contours of the contemporary evangelical worldview. More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more likely than members of other faith groups to own a gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around. White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration reform and have more negative views of immigrants than any other religious demographic; two-thirds support Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants—more than any other demographic—do not think that the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US population would be a negative development. White evangelicals are considerably more likely than others to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,” and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly more authoritarian than other religious groups, and they express confidence in their religious leaders at much higher rates than do members of other faiths.

Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

This is my army,” I say more loudly. “This is my army. Its evils are mine as much as yours, as much as they are Tactus’s. Every time any of you commit a crime like this, something gratuitous and perverse, you will own it and I will own it with you, because when you do something wicked, it hurts all of us.” Tactus stands there like a fool. He’s confused. I shove him hard in the chest. He stumbles back. I follow him, shoving. “What were you going to do?” I push his hand holding the leather switch back toward his chest. “I don’t know what you mean …” he murmurs as I shove him. “Come on, man! You were going to shove your prick inside someone in my army. Why not whip me while you’re at it? Why not hurt me too? It’ll be easier. Milia won’t even try to stab you. I promise.” I shove him again. He looks around. No one speaks. I strip off my shirt and go to my knees. The air is cold. Knees on stone and snow. My eyes lock with Mustang’s. She winks at me and I feel like I can do anything. I tell Tactus to give me twenty-five lashes. I’ve taken worse. His arms are weak and so is his will to do it. It still stings, but I stand up after five lashes and give the lash to Pax. They start the count at six. “Start over!” I shout. “A little rapist cur can’t swing hard enough to hurt me.” But Pax bloodywell can. My army cries in protest. They don’t understand. Golds don’t do this. Golds don’t sacrifice for one another. Leaders take; they do not give. My army cries out again. I ask them, how is this worse than the rape they were all so comfortable with? Is not Nyla now one of us? Is she not part of the body? Like Reds are. Like Obsidians are. Like all the Colors are. Pax

Equal protection under the law is not a hard principle to convince Americans of. The difficulty comes in persuading them that it has been violated in particular cases, and of the need to redress the wrong. Prejudice and indifference run deep. Education, social reform, and political action can persuade some. But most people will not feel the sufferings of others unless they feel, even in an abstract way, that 'it could have been me or someone close to me'. Consider the astonishingly rapid transformation of American attitudes toward homosexuality and even gay marriage over the past decades. Gay activism brought these issues to public attention but attitudes were changed during tearful conversations over dinner tables across American when children came out to their parents (and, sometimes, parents came out to their children). Once parents began to accept their children, extended families did too, and today same-sex marriages are celebrated across the country with all the pomp and joy and absurd overspending of traditional American marriages. Race is a wholly different matter. Given the segregation in American society white families have little chance of seeing and therefore understanding the lives of black Americans. I am not black male motorist and never will be. All the more reason, then, that I need some way to identify with one if I am going to be affected by his experience. And citizenship is the only thing I know we share. The more differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment. Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. There is no denying that by publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans the movement mobilized supporters and delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But there is also no denying that the movement's decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American society, and its law enforcement institutions, and to use Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence (most spectacularly in a public confrontation with Hillary Clinton, of all people), played into the hands of the Republican right. As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same. Those who play one race card should be prepared to be trumped by another, as we saw subtly and not so subtly in the 2016 presidential election. And it just gives that adversary an additional excuse to be indifferent to you. There is a reason why the leaders of the civil rights movement did not talk about identity the way black activists do today, and it was not cowardice or a failure to be "woke". The movement shamed America into action by consciously appealing to what we share, so that it became harder for white Americans to keep two sets of books, psychologically speaking: one for "Americans" and one for "Negroes". That those leaders did not achieve complete success does not mean that they failed, nor does it prove that a different approach is now necessary. No other approach is likely to succeed. Certainly not one that demands that white Americans agree in every case on what constitutes discrimination or racism today. In democratic politics it is suicidal to set the bar for agreement higher than necessary for winning adherents and elections.

If we truly seek to understand segregationists—not to excuse or absolve them, but to understand them—then we must first understand how they understood themselves. Until now, because of the tendency to focus on the reactionary leaders of massive resistance, segregationists have largely been understood simply as the opposition to the civil rights movement. They have been framed as a group focused solely on suppressing the rights of others, whether that be the larger cause of “civil rights” or any number of individual entitlements, such as the rights of blacks to vote, assemble, speak, protest, or own property. Segregationists, of course, did stand against those things, and often with bloody and brutal consequences. But, like all people, they did not think of themselves in terms of what they opposed but rather in terms of what they supported. The conventional wisdom has held that they were only fighting against the rights of others. But, in their own minds, segregationists were instead fighting for rights of their own—such as the “right” to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the “right” to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps most important, the “right” to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government. To be sure, all of these positive “rights” were grounded in a negative system of discrimination and racism. In the minds of segregationists, however, such rights existed all the same. Indeed, from their perspective, it was clearly they who defended individual freedom, while the “so-called civil rights activists” aligned themselves with a powerful central state, demanded increased governmental regulation of local affairs, and waged a sustained assault on the individual economic, social, and political prerogatives of others. The true goal of desegregation, these white southerners insisted, was not to end the system of racial oppression in the South, but to install a new system that oppressed them instead. As this study demonstrates, southern whites fundamentally understood their support of segregation as a defense of their own liberties, rather than a denial of others’.

Neoliberal ideology has radically altered our working lives, leaving us isolated and exposed. The ‘freedom and independence’ of the gig economy it celebrates, in which regular jobs are replaced by an illusion of self-employment, often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net and no sense of community. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said the following in a magazine interview: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.8 As always, Thatcher was faithfully repeating the snake-oil remedies of neoliberalism. Precious few of the ideas attributed to her were her own. They were formulated by men like Hayek and Friedman, then spun by the think tanks and academic departments of the Neoliberal International. In this short quote, we see three of the ideology’s core tenets distilled: First, everyone is responsible for their own destiny, and if you fall through the cracks, the fault is yours and yours alone. Second, the state has no responsibility for those in economic distress, even those without a home. Third, there is no legitimate form of social organization beyond the individual and the family. There is genuine belief here. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes,9 which sees humankind as engaged in a war of ‘every man against every man’. Hayek believed that this frantic competition delivered social benefits, generating the wealth which would eventually enrich us all. But there is also political calculation. Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless. As individual consumers, we can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes. But as citizens, combining effectively with others to form political movements, there is almost nothing we cannot do. Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher

Power is seeping away from autocrats and single-party systems whether they embrace reform or not. It is spreading from large and long-established political parties to small ones with narrow agendas or niche constituencies. Even within parties, party bosses who make decisions, pick candidates, and hammer out platforms behind closed doors are giving way to insurgents and outsiders—to new politicians who haven’t risen up in the party machine, who never bothered to kiss the ring. People entirely outside the party structure—charismatic individuals, some with wealthy backers from outside the political class, others simply catching a wave of support thanks to new messaging and mobilization tools that don’t require parties—are blazing a new path to political power. Whatever path they followed to get there, politicians in government are finding that their tenure is getting shorter and their power to shape policy is decaying. Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating—sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all. Gridlock is more common at every level of decision-making in the political system, in all areas of government, and in most countries. Coalitions collapse, elections take place more often, and “mandates” prove ever more elusive. Decentralization and devolution are creating new legislative and executive bodies. In turn, more politicians and elected or appointed officials are emerging from these stronger municipalities and regional assemblies, eating into the power of top politicians in national capitals. Even the judicial branch is contributing: judges are getting friskier and more likely to investigate political leaders, block or reverse their actions, or drag them into corruption inquiries that divert them from passing laws and making policy. Winning an election may still be one of life’s great thrills, but the afterglow is diminishing. Even being at the top of an authoritarian government is no longer as safe and powerful a perch as it once was. As Professor Minxin Pei, one of the world’s most respected experts on China, told me: “The members of the politburo now openly talk about the old good times when their predecessors at the top of the Chinese Communist Party did not have to worry about bloggers, hackers, transnational criminals, rogue provincial leaders or activists that stage 180,000 public protests each year. When challengers appeared, the old leaders had more power to deal with them. Today’s leaders are still very powerful but not as much as those of a few decades back and their powers are constantly declining.”3

The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment. It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption. Churches have been established for the underprivileged, for the weak, for the poor, on the theory that they prefer to be among themselves. Churches have been established for the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean, the Mexican, the Filipino, the Italian, and the Negro, with the same theory in mind. The result is that in the one place in which normal, free contacts might be most naturally established—in which the relations of the individual to his God should take priority over conditions of class, race, power, status, wealth, or the like—this place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers. It is in order to quote these paragraphs from a recently published book, The Protestant Church and the Negro, by Frank S. Loescher: There are approximately 8,000,000 Protestant Negroes. About 7,500,000 are in separate Negro denominations. Therefore, from the local church through the regional organizations to the national assemblies over 93 per cent of the Negroes are without association in work and worship with Christians of other races except in interdenominational organizations which involves a few of their leaders. The remaining 500,000 Negro Protestants—about 6 per cent—are in predominantly white denominations, and of these 500,000 Negroes in “white” churches, at least 99 per cent, judging by the surveys of six denominations, are in segregated congregations. They are in association with their white denominational brothers only in national assemblies, and, in some denominations, in regional, state, or more local jurisdictional meetings. There remains a handful of Negro members in local “white” churches. How many? Call it one-tenth of one per cent of all the Negro Protestant Christians in the United States—8,000 souls—the figure is probably much too large. Whatever the figure actually is, the number of white and Negro persons who ever gather together for worship under the auspices of Protestant Christianity is almost microscopic. And where interracial worship does occur, it is, for the most part, in communities where there are only a few Negro families and where, therefore, only a few Negro individuals are available to “white” churches. That is the over-all picture, a picture which hardly reveals the Protestant church as a dynamic agency in the integration of American Negroes into American life. Negro membership appears to be confined to less than one per cent of the local “white” churches, usually churches in small communities where but a few Negroes live and have already experienced a high degree of integration by other community institutions—communities one might add where it is unsound to establish a Negro church since Negroes are in such small numbers. It is an even smaller percentage of white churches in which Negroes are reported to be participating freely, or are integrated

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

Local authorities keep an eye on proceedings. The Saigon Protestant Church in Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, one of the biggest in the country, has to submit a list of its event schedules, financial records and appointments of Church leaders to government officials for their prior approval.

I came to hear the screams: the screams of protest against murderous treachery; the screams of rage from the leaders of drow society, the high priestesses of the Spider Queen, echoing down the paths of my mind, ever to hold a place within my mind. The screams of dying children. —Drizzt Do’Urden

Mehta added that Atal summoned A.B. Bardhan and Harkishan Singh Surjeet (leaders from the left whose parties were holding demonstrations against the Iraq invasion) and asked them how the demonstrations were doing. They said that they were going well. Vinod Mehta further writes, ‘Vajpayee said, “But I cannot hear anything.” The canny old fox was suggesting that they raise the decibel level of the protests so he could tell Bush that his hands were tied. Note the subtlety of his strategy,’ he adds.

On Saturday, June 21, crowds of veterans and their families filled the street in front of Winnipeg’s city hall to protest the arrests. Mounted police charged the throng; special constables attacked with clubs. “Bloody Saturday” and the ensuing trials of the strike leaders (British or Canadian to a man) gave Winnipeg’s workers a bitter memory of their ordeal. Driven back to the city’s north end, they gave their neighbourhoods a durable allegiance to labour and socialist politics.

Freedom of speech and the right to protest have undermined the foundational culture of mutual honor and respect that was universal among the founders of the United States of America.  Her earliest governmental leaders were statesmen, not politicians.  They carefully held their various views within a priority of mutual honor and respect.  The 2016 presidential race is a clear repudiation of such culture and character.

At Trent, Weigel explains, the Protestant Reformation was the greatest challenge to the Faith, and the council fathers prescribed a response that emphasized theological orthodoxy, personal piety, and the establishment of distinctively Catholic institutions. That formula worked wonderfully for generations, unleashing the power of the Counter-Reformation and bringing new vigor to the life of the Church. But over the centuries, the movement lost its initial energy and purpose. The reforms begun by the leaders of the Counter-Reformation became settled patterns, a familiar way of life, which could easily become a routine.

Thus, the vigorous defense of the Faith eventually deteriorated into what might simply be characterized as a defensive attitude. In his book The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America, David Carlin makes a point that resonates with Weigel’s historical analysis: One of the great hymns of the Reformation was Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” In its reaction to the Reformation, Catholicism might well have taken the title of this hymn for its own slogan—for that is what the Church became: it turned itself, metaphorically speaking, into a mighty ecclesiastical fortress. Eventually it recognized that the chances of regaining most of the lost provinces were slim, but it was absolutely determined to hold on to what remained: France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, southern Germany, Poland, Ireland, and (an area of great new gains) Latin America. This siege mentality prevailed in the Counter-Reformation Church—a mentality that placed primary importance on survival. The fortress mentality exercised enormous influence on the Church in the United States, where Catholics were always a minority, anxious to gain acceptance in a predominantly Protestant society. Ambitious Church leaders sought to build up their parishes, parochial schools, Catholic universities, and lay associations, for whose use the “parish plants” were built. With each succeeding generation, the Catholic Church became a more entrenched institution, with all the benefits—but also the dangers—of acceptance as part of the established American way of life.

There are echoes today of the same nationalism, protectionism, and xenophobia that led to last century’s world wars. Icons of heinous civil wars are being torn down, and those same acts are being protested by those who think our ugliest times were our best times. There are world leaders today whose rhetoric reminds us of speeches we thought we would never tolerate again.

By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings. In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds. Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous. The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower. In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia. Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.

Let me give a general description of what seems really to have happened when Gandhi and his followers committed civil disobedience: Gandhi and followers break a law—politely. Public leader has them arrested, tried, put in prison. Gandhi and followers cheerfully accept it all. Members of the public are impressed by the protest, public sympathy is aroused for the protesters and their cause. Members of the public put pressure on public leader to negotiate with Gandhi. As cycles of civil disobedience recur, public pressure grows stronger. Finally, public leader gives in to pressure from his constituency, negotiates with Gandhi.

You will be a great leader.” Bluestar’s voice was the merest whisper. “One of the greatest the forest has ever known. You will have the warmth of fire to protect your Clan and the fierceness of fire to defend it. You will be Firestar, the light of ThunderClan.” “No,” Fireheart protested. “I can’t. Not without you, Bluestar.” But it was too late. Bluestar sighed softly, and the light died from her eyes.

But my dear sir, the United Irishmen were primarily Protestants – their leaders were Protestants. Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy were Protestants. The Emmets, the O’Connors, Simon Butler, Hamilton Rowan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald were Protestants. And the whole idea of the club was to unite Protestant and Catholic and Presbyterian Irishmen. The Protestants it was who took the initiative.

We can also surface milestones that would have gone unnoticed. • What if every member of a youth sports team got a “before-and-after” video of their progress? • Number-heavy organizational goals are fine as tools of accountability, but smart leaders surface more motivational milestones en route to the target. 8. Moments when we display courage make us proud. We never know when courage will be demanded, but we can practice to ensure we’re ready. • The protesters involved in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins didn’t just show courage, they rehearsed it. 9. Practicing courage lets us “preload” our responses. • Gentile’s approach to ethics says we usually know WHAT is right but don’t know HOW to act. 10. Courage is contagious; our moments of action can be a defining moment for others.

the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.*1

The new leader’s threatening words often have a boomerang effect. If the media feels threatened, it may abandon restraint and professional standards in a desperate effort to weaken the government. And the opposition may conclude that, for the good of the country, the government must be removed via extreme measures—impeachment, mass protest, even a coup.

were identified “as located within individuals” and overlooked the “undeniable social causation of many such problems.” 30 This was in addition to a flood of protest from American professionals, including leaders of the American Psychological Association and the American Counseling Association. Why are relationships or social conditions left out? 31 If you pay attention only to faulty biology and defective genes as the cause of mental problems and ignore abandonment, abuse, and deprivation, you are likely to run into as many dead ends as previous generations did blaming it all on terrible mothers.

The Christian ought always to begin with a bias in favor of a movement which protests against the unfair treatment of the poor, for surely Christianity is itself such a protest.

A corrupt and dynastic political party is antithetical to the rule of law and to carefully crafted constitutional checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. A tendency towards autocracy and consequent institutional subversion is inevitable with a party thus configured. The result is a prime minister bereft of real power, subservient to the dynastic head and a mute spectator to the loot and plunder of the nation’s resources; a president who is a loyal camp follower and will faithfully rubber stamp the decisions ordained by the dynasty: witness how unhesitatingly President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the Proclamation of Emergency at Mrs. Gandhi’s bidding in 1975 and ponder whether Mrs. Pratibha Patil, (besieged as she was by her co-operative sugar factory in liquidation, her co-operative bank bankrupt, and her family embroiled in the murder case of a popular intra-party rival in Jalgaon at the time of her nomination by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi), would have done otherwise; or for that matter whether President Pranab Mukherjee, whose many acts of subversion of the Constitution during the Emergency have been documented by the Shah Commission, is so radically transformed that he would now protect it; a judiciary accused of judicial overreach when it censures the government or brings its ministers to book while its inconvenient judgments are subjected to review or Presidential Reference; a CAG whose findings against the government’s decisions are vilified as being patently erroneous, in excess of jurisdiction and even motivated, although that august body, the Constituent Assembly had opined that as the guardian of the nation’s finances, the CAG was as important a Constitutional functionary as the justices of the Supreme Court; a CVC appointed despite the taint of corruption and over the protest of the leader of the Opposition, whose appointment was finally quashed by the Supreme Court; and a CBI whose only role on empirical evidence is to falsely implicate political opponents and wrongly exonerate the regime’s members and cronies.

He would insist on his right, his obligation, to tell it straight. His language, the belittling little “bye-bye” wave he gave when security guards ushered out protesters who shouted “You’re a bigot!”—Trump would never apologize for that. He explained to the crowd, “I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. . . . I don’t have to be plainspoken. I have, like, this incredible vocabulary. But, honestly, how can I describe our leaders better than the word stupid? . . . I used to say ‘grossly incompetent,’ but stupid’s stronger, isn’t it?” The

A Protestant Reformer from South Germany. Bucer joined the *Reformation through the influence of Martin *Luther, leaving the Dominican order. After moving to Strasbourg, Bucer became an important leader who sought to resolve the controversies between the Swiss Reformed and Lutherans regarding the *Lord’s Supper, eventually reaching an agreement with Philipp *Melanchthon. Upon

Three Religious Truths • Jewish folk do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. • Protestant folk do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian faith. • Baptist folk do not recognize each other at Hooters.

I had just drifted off to sleep when Jerry woke me up. “Hey, we’re going to take the Humvee and pick up the rest of the platoon. They’re done with the gravel run. There’s no mission. We need empty seats in the Humvee. I just wanted you to know that we’re leaving. Go back to sleep,” Jerry whispered. I leapt right off my cot and said, “No, sir. If you go, I go. If y’all go and something happens I will never forgive myself. And what if y’all get into an awesome firefight? I’m itching for that. I’m not going to miss that. I am going and I am driving the lead vehicle.” Jerry protested. “What about Gebhardt? He doesn’t want you driving.” “He can yell at me when we get there,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go. And I want to drive. I never get to drive,” Jerry said. “Jerry, you’re not driving. You can ride in the Humvee with me but you’re not driving. I’m not going to let you.” Now, Jerry outranked me, which meant he could do whatever he wanted. But that was also why he wasn’t supposed to drive. I was talking to Jerry as a friend now, though. I reminded him of that conversation we had in the gym before we deployed. “I told you that I was never going to let anything happen to you. I would jump in front of a bullet to keep you from getting hurt. Nothing will ever happen to you while I’m around. You’re not driving.” He finally relented and said, “Okay.” We piled into the Humvees and headed out. Jerry rode with me in the lead vehicle. That’s not following protocol. The platoon leader should be in the middle of the convoy, but neither Jerry nor I ever wanted to be there. We wanted to be in the lead, always.

areas that were once the preserve of national sovereignty are now ring-fenced by international law and global regulation. The instinct in Davos is to push even more policy-making out of the range of nation states. The answer to Europe’s problems is always more Europe. The answer to the global trade backlash is always to sell trade deals more effectively. It should come as no surprise that democracies are now loath to ratify such agreements. The last time any serious world trade talks were held in a Western city was in Seattle in 1999. It was shut down by protesters. The next time global leaders made the attempt was in 2002, from the safe space of the Arabian Gulf where no dissenters could be heard. The Doha Round died a few years later. Now Donald Trump has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the deal that was launched by George W. Bush and completed by Barack Obama. Trump is also picking apart the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement and has buried hopes of a transatlantic agreement. Britain, meanwhile, is abandoning the European single market. The

The Boston Tea Party was a protest against an unelected leader who raised taxes, while Obama was an elected leader who had just cut them.

High technology and the Internet, however, have a dark side, as far as China’s leaders are concerned. They now know that the Falun Gong adherents who surrounded Zhongnanhai, the Party’s leadership compound in Beijing, had organized themselves over the Internet. And through the Internet that group, now branded “an evil cult” and outlawed, has continued its protests. Observers wonder why China’s state apparatus is bedeviled by a group armed only with spiritualism and one another’s e-mail addresses.

If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom, reoriented America’s opinion of China, removed terrorist leaders from the battlefield, revamped the space program, secured an originalist majority on the US Supreme Court, and authorized Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6. They will focus on Trump’s tortured relationship with the alt-right, on his atrocious handling of the deadly Charlottesville protest in 2017, on the rise in political violence during his tenure in office, and on his encouragement of malevolent conspiracy theories. Trump joined the ranks of American villains from John C. Calhoun to Andrew Johnson, from Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace.

The earliest Protestant leaders—Luther in Germany, Zwingli in Zurich, Cranmer in England, Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, Philipp Melanchthon as Luther’s closest junior colleague, Peter Martyr from Eastern Europe, John Knox in Scotland, and many more—expected, or at least hoped, that their diligent attention to the great spiritual questions would lead to a general reformation of the one Western church.

The second mistake is to reduce the religious developments of the sixteenth century to functions of these other dimensions of European cultural change, as if, for example, all the powerful leaders who became Protestants did so merely to take over the lands and influence of the Catholic Church. Certainly interconnections existed, but the motives that drove the early Protestants, as well as their Catholic opponents, are often best explained in precisely the religious terms with which they expressed them—that is, Protestants abandoning the Catholic Church in order to pursue what they held to be the way of salvation, Catholics working to strengthen the church as the only antidote to what they regarded as the spiritual chaos brought about by Protestantism.

Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage. Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuaded several female labor leaders to protest the disfranchisement of women, the masses of working women were far too concerned about their immediate problems—wages, hours, working conditions—to fight for a cause that seemed terribly abstract.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, had visited the Oval Office in March, and I’d found him impressive. A grizzled, engaging former labor leader who’d been jailed for protesting the previous military government and then elected in 2002, he had initiated a series of pragmatic reforms that sent Brazil’s growth rate soaring, expanded its middle class, and provided housing and education to millions of its poorest citizens. He also reportedly had the scruples of a Tammany Hall boss, and rumors swirled about government cronyism, sweetheart deals, and kickbacks that ran into the billions.

In making policy on Palestine over most of the past century, leaders in both Britain and the United States were driven primarily by powerful strategic and domestic political considerations, rather than by principle. The strategic considerations included the goals of dominating this crucial piece of territory, keeping it in friendly hands, and denying it to others. The political ones included cold calculations of the considerable domestic electoral and financial advantages to be obtained from supporting Zionism, as against the negligible domestic political costs. There also existed naive sympathy for Zionism among many British and American politicians, based on a particularly Protestant immersion in the Bible. This sympathy was often combined with a laudable desire to make amends for the persecution of the Jews in different parts of Europe (often combined with a less laudable, indeed reprehensible, desire to have the victims of persecution find haven somewhere other than Great Britain or the United States). The result of such attitudes, which necessarily ignored or downplayed vital realities on the ground in Palestine, has been an enduring tragedy.