One recent fall morning at a coffee shop in Princeton, I overheard two students chatting about upcoming deadlines for the Rhodes, the Marshall, and the Mitchell—three prestigious postgraduate scholarships so coveted that they’ve become mononymous on elite campuses.“I don’t love the Rhodes dude from the 1800s,” one student confessed to the other. “Wasn’t he, like, racist?”Indeed.
Miley Cyrus vowed not to have a baby on a “piece-of-shit planet.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mused in an Instagram video about whether it’s still okay to have children. Polls suggest that a third or more of Americans younger than 45 either don’t have children or expect to have fewer than they might otherwise because they are worried about climate change.
Dan Darling was the consummate evangelical insider, until he wasn’t. Over the years, he has run the communications shop for several big-name Christian organizations, most recently the National Religious Broadcasters, or NRB, an association of more than 1,000 Christian radio hosts, television producers, and other media professionals. But at the end of August, he was fired.
Emily Oster is a popular target for irrational hatred. When I was reporting a story on how progressive communities have approached COVID-19 lockdown restrictions this spring, she showed me an email she got from a random person who had written to all of her bosses at Brown University, accusing her of promoting genocide. To be clear, Oster does no such thing: She’s an economist who has become semi-famous for her books on data and parenting decisions.
Senator Bob Corker had just gotten out of a hot-yoga session with his wife on a Sunday morning in 2017 when his phone started blowing up. President Donald Trump was tweeting about him, falsely claiming that the Tennessee Republican supported the Iran deal (he did not) and that he had begged Trump for a reelection endorsement (Corker says he never did such a thing).
Esau McCaulley has been caught between multiple identities his whole life. Family legend has it that his grandfather couldn’t read, and when it came time to pick a baby name for McCaulley’s father, that grandfather opened the Bible and pointed to a word, not realizing it was Esau.
Bishop T. D. Jakes is one of the most famous pastors in America. His multi-thousand-member Dallas megachurch, the Potter’s House, is just one part of his platform; he’s recorded gospel albums, starred in television broadcasts, led several popular conference series, and published numerous books, including his latest, Don’t Drop the Mic.
Much of America is going through a Madonna moment: Like a virgin, touched for the very first time! Brushing against a stranger in a restaurant, clobbering someone with a hug, shaking a new acquaintance’s hand—for those who have stayed isolated over the past 15 months, these experiences can feel novel and exciting and highly weird. Perhaps no one is better suited to advise us on navigating this moment than Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, America’s favorite nonagenarian sex therapist.Dr.
Will Hurd is the kind of politician who loves to find the middle ground. He spent six years as a Republican congressman from one of the most competitive districts in the country, a sprawling expanse that traces the southwest border of Texas along the Rio Grande. He’s got the jocular manner of a student-body president—which he was, at Texas A&M—and styles himself as a wonkish policy guy. “You said the magic word,” he told me cheerfully when I called him up recently.
Archbishop Joseph Naumann is anxious about President Joe Biden’s soul. The two men are in some ways similar: cradle Catholics born in the 1940s who witnessed John F. Kennedy become America’s first Catholic president. Both found a natural home in the Democratic Party—in Naumann’s midwestern family, asking Catholics if they were Democrats was a redundancy. Naumann became a priest and Biden became a politician, but their paths really diverged over the issue of abortion.
Father Kevin Gillespie and the staff at Holy Trinity Catholic Church find out that President Joe Biden is coming to Mass an hour and a half ahead of time. For security reasons, only a few people can know, including the music director, who might otherwise get suspicious when Secret Service agents start poking around in her piano. The parish limits its services to 50 people to minimize the spread of COVID-19, but it makes an exception when the president and his detail attend.
The PR pitch was brazen: Eric Metaxas, it declared, is “America’s #1 Bad Christian.” The Christian writer and radio host has been promoting doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, including at a prayer rally he emceed on the National Mall in December. Metaxas has tweeted “martial rhetoric” in defense of former President Donald Trump, his publicist wrote cheerfully. He even appeared in a New York Times article about Christian extremism.
Since Josh Hawley was a young man, powerful people have told him he was special. His teachers gave him the “Special R” award, just one feather in the Rockhurst High School valedictorian’s cap of outstandingness. Hawley’s mentor at Stanford, David Kennedy, took a shine to him just weeks into his freshman year, and came to see him as possibly the most gifted student he ever taught.
Updated 11:56 a.m. on January 3, 2020.Denver Riggleman had a rough December. For one thing, he’s about to lose his job: Over the summer, members of the Virginia GOP voted to kick the freshman Republican out of Congress, largely because he publicly officiated a same-sex wedding. Riggleman’s cousin died of COVID-19 the week before Christmas, and his grandmother had to be hospitalized with the virus.
I got a call on a Wednesday morning from a number with a Long Island area code. Long Island? I picked up, because why not.“Emma? This is Santa speaking.”My caller, it turned out, was not just Santa but the National Santa™, a.k.a. Santa Tim Connaghan, the Big Daddy of American Saint Nicks. Santa Tim’s website features pictures of him posing with Giada De Laurentiis, Dr. Phil, and Jewel; he’s the guy Melania Trump called for help at a Toys for Tots event.
ATLANTA—Georgia wasn’t supposed to turn blue. Not yet, and especially not in the suburbs of Atlanta, where Newt Gingrich arguably launched the modern conservative movement in the early 1990s and cemented the stereotype of these sprawling neighborhoods as rich, white, and die-hard Republican. This is where a generation of conservative political stars fostered their careers: former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, longtime U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, even Sean Hannity.
Senate Republicans were always going to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Conservative voters wanted it, and the party united around the concept. Republicans “believe voting on this justice is a constitutional duty. The nomination happened. There was time to get it done. So they got it done,” Steven Duffield, a Republican former senior Senate aide, told me.
The kind of people who run for the United States Senate overlap strongly with the kind of people who like to make grandstanding speeches about the sweep of history and the decline of democracy. Senators were in full form today during the close of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearings. “There are very few written rules around here. The most important rules are the unwritten ones.
Amy Coney Barrett could no longer avoid the question that has defined her nomination to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court: “Do you agree,” asked Senator Dianne Feinstein of California during confirmation hearings today, “that Roe was wrongly decided?”“I completely understand why you are asking the question,” Barrett responded, looking grave.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today in a fuchsia dress and pearls, listening quietly as Republican senators depicted her as the ideal modern feminist. “How do you and your husband manage two, full-time professional careers and, at the same time, take care of your large family?” Senator John Cornyn of Texas wanted to know.
Ben Sasse is worried. With 22 days to go before the election, the Nebraska senator and his colleagues are about to begin a showdown over the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, which he likened to the deadly 19th-century feuds between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Updated on September 26, 2020 at 5:21 a.m. ET.When President Donald Trump announced today that Amy Coney Barrett is his nominee for the Supreme Court, he was effectively declaring victory. In 2016, Trump offered a horse trade to American conservatives: In exchange for their votes, he promised to appoint judges who would champion their interests.
When President Donald Trump announces tomorrow that Amy Coney Barrett is his nominee for the Supreme Court, he will be effectively declaring victory. In 2016, Trump offered a horse trade to American conservatives: In exchange for their votes, he promised to appoint judges who would champion their interests. This nomination will be yet another chance for Trump to remind his supporters that their bet paid off, conveniently timed just a few weeks before Election Day.
Night after night, the Republican National Convention invited Black speakers to the stage to testify that President Donald Trump is not a bigot. “It hurt my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald,” said the former NFL player Herschel Walker, who once worked for a team owned by Trump. “The worst one is ‘racist.’ I take it as a personal insult that people would think I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a racist.
President Donald Trump is in trouble with women voters, and the GOP knows it. At the Republican National Convention last night, everyone from Vice President Mike Pence to Trump’s departing counselor, Kellyanne Conway, eagerly pointed out that they were speaking on the 100th anniversary of the signing of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote.
As president and chancellor of the country’s largest Christian university and the son of one of the founding fathers of the religious right, Jerry Falwell Jr. has come to serve as a stand-in for American evangelicals. But to those inside the Liberty University community, Falwell’s leading role has lately seemed more like a liability than an asset. On Friday, the executive committee of the school’s board announced that Falwell will take an indefinite leave of absence.
Chief Justice John Roberts balked.This morning, the Supreme Court announced its decision in June Medical Services v. Russo, the first big test of whether, and how, this Court—with two Donald Trump appointees—would revise abortion rights in the United States. When Trump was running for president, he explicitly promised to appoint judges who would “automatically” overturn Roe v. Wade, the case that established the constitutionality of abortion.
Virginia Republicans have spent the past decade getting routed in elections. They lost three U.S. congressional seats and control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2018 alone. Yet today, with another tough election less than five months away, Republicans in Virginia’s Fifth District will gather in a church parking lot to decide whether to boot their incumbent congressman, Denver Riggleman, largely because he officiated a same-sex wedding last summer.