Fascist Politics in Our Time

I became active in political protest in the 1960s, and from that time to this, there have been countless accusations that some politician or political system was “fascist.” Usually, this was taken to be but an exaggerated form of criticism, the term “fascist” not literal but a kind of shorthand. Now, however, with the advent of Donald Trump and other ‘populist’ leaders worldwide, the term has begun to sound more and more literal. It takes only a little remembrance of the tactics of the Trump campaign to realize that this would-be dictator has employed strategies that appear dangerously close to those of fascist leaders in the pre-World War II era. Now comes a book by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them(Random House: 2018), that outlines the basic characteristics of fascism, including how the politics of our current president adheres more closely to them than many have dared to think. 

What Stanley does is write a chapter about each of ten different political strategies that define fascist politics: The Mythic Past, Propaganda, Anti-Intellectual, Unreality, Hierarchy, Victimhood, Law and Order, Sexual Anxiety, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Arbeit Macht Frei. He proceeds to show how each of these, both singly and collectively, serves to exacerbate the divide between “us” (the favored population) and “them” (the outsiders who are targeted in the fascist state). He also shows how the most notable fascist leaders, like Hitler and Mussolini and also Viktor Orban of today’s Hungary, use these strategies to seize and hold power in their respective fascist states. Throughout, Stanley makes plain that he is not studying fascism per se (though he does comment that by fascism, he means a kind of ultra-nationialism where the nation is represented by an authoritarian leader who claims to literally “be” the nation). Rather, he is outlining how his ten categories work in combination to implement “fascist politics,” or, as he puts it: “my interest is in fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power.” Whether those tactics result in a state one could actually label “fascist” is implied, but by no means guaranteed. The real danger they represent lies in how they “dehumanize” certain segments of the population—in short, whatever “them” is targeted. 

            First—and Benito Mussolini with his recalling for Italians the “glorious” past of the Roman Empire (and his use of a Roman term, fasces,to characterize his regime as “fascism”) is the prototype—the evocation of a mythic past is almost a given. Importantly, the past recalled is an invention, not a true remembrance of history. Hitler and his Nazis, in turn, sought to fetishize the volkisch movement, a mythic, medieval Germanic past evoking close-knit ethnic and racial ties. The idea was to get back to an imagined past where Germanic peoples, the volk, were united by blood. It can easily be seen how more modern movements use the same inventions keyed to their local histories. In India, the current leader, Narendra Modi, is a member of RSS, a far-right Hindu nationalist party calling for the suppression of non-Hindu minorities. Similar movements in Hungary, Poland and even France are characterized by similar appeals to an ethnically-united, mythic past. In the same way, the past is regularly mythologized in the American South to whitewash slavery and to justify the monuments that still glorify the Confederacy and its ‘noble’ fight against the Union. It has been noted elsewhere (see Greg Grandin, The Nation, June 2016, “It’s the Empire, Stupid’) that nations with waning empires are particularly susceptible to fascist appeals to this mythic past. We only have to think of Donald Trump’s “Make American Great Again” campaign slogan to realize how this might appeal especially to white men whose jobs have disappeared and who, fearing that they are being replaced by dark “outsiders,” would want to imagine a past when their good jobs seemed secure and their right to rule was unquestioned. 

            The value of Propaganda for fascist politics hardly needs demonstrating. The basic idea is to united people by disguising, with acceptable ideals, the actual nefarious goals that are sought. Donald Trump’s campaign slogan about “draining the swamp” in Washington is a perfect example of calling “corrupt” the state that he wanted to run in his own corrupt way. And that is exactly what has happened. How do fascist politicians get away with this? By the implication, as Stanley makes clear, that the corruption they seek to eliminate is really “the corruption of purity rather than of law…corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order” (26). In this sense, the fact that Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, even lived in the White House, was a kind of corruption of tradition (white men only in the White House), and Trump supporters could see the former President and everything he did as corrupt. In thus undermining reasonable public discourse, which is a necessary part of democracy, fascist propaganda segues neatly into what Stanley calls “Anti-Intellectualism.” Here, the value of education, of expertise, of complex language are all devalued in the effort to leave only one thing in their place: the power of those in the tribe, especially the ‘leader’. This power is typically expressed in simple language such as that used by Trump with his slogans. Stanley cites a February 2018 interview with Steve Bannon, who said: “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall” (55). The complex ideas promoted in university faculties and in education in general, by contrast, undermine the effectiveness of such simple-minded slogans and must be attacked. Universities thus become the lair of Marxists and Communists seeking to invalidate the national myths. Both of these tactics, in turn, lead to the next one: Unreality. With “liberal elites” and rational thought condemned as biased, the ability to agree on truth itself becomes fraught with anger and argument. Anything that contradicts the Dear Leader’s pronouncements or desires gets labeled “fake news.” As Stanley puts it, 

Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual…Regular, repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space (57). 

Though reputable newspapers like the Washington Post have consistently totaled up the numbers of false statements Trump has uttered (well over 4,000), the president seems untouched by such accounting. He needs only cry “fake news,” seconded by his propaganda channel, Fox News, to be believed by his adoring, and misinformed supporters. What is even more astonishing is that these supporters treat such obvious lies as more truthful than the more accurate words of conventional politicians. Trump, according to his followers, is “telling it like it is.” 

            In accord with the myths of a glorious past that fascist politics exalts, it also exalts the myth of Hierarchy (racial or economic or gender) in society—where leadership, honor and money go disproportionately to the powerful. The myth inheres in the fact that this allegedly accords with nature or the divine plan. Stanley puts it succinctly: “For the fascist, the principle of equality is a denial of natural law…The natural law allegedly places men over women, and members of the chosen nation of the fascist over other groupings” (80). One of the most memorable examples cited by Stanley is a March 21, 1861 speech by Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. Known as the Cornerstone Speech, it specifically identifies constitutional principles of equality as violations of nature:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of equality]; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition (80). 

The very same principle of racial inequality or hierarchy formed the cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich. And the concomitant to this alleged ‘natural’ principle is the fascist politician’s disdain for the “undeserving,” those who receive government help or healthcare. Donald Trump made this point recurrently in his campaign and it was meant to evoke, in his rabid followers, their complaint that whereas we are hardworking, upstanding citizens, they, the others—of whom there are many, mostly people of color or immigrants—are lazy and unwilling to work. When a nation is in the condition of apparently losing its favored or wealthy status—as many pre-fascist states typically are—this sense of loss becomes aggravated to the point at which the appeal of fascist leaders becomes particularly strong. We’re losing and we don’t deserve to lose, becomes the cry of those who follow such a leader.  

            This paves the way for one of the most important chapters in Stanley’s book: Victimhood. In the United States, at least since the Civil War, this has always taken the form of whites feeling like victims to government-imposed equality. While the Civil Rights Act of 1866 finally made black Americans U.S. citizens with protected civil rights, it took not even a month for new President Andrew Johnson to veto the act because it gave the ‘colored race’ more safeguards than the white race ever had. Johnson saw this as “discrimination against the white race.” Today’s whites, especially in the solidly Trumpian states of the South and Midwest, see the same thing. As Stanley points out, 

Forty-five percent of President Donald Trump’s supporters believe that whites are the most discriminated-against racial group in America; 54 percent of Trump’s supporters believe that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in America (94). 

Stanley cites several studies showing that the prediction of the U.S. becoming a “majority-minority” country around 2050 is seen as highly threatening by white groups, to the point where many feel like victims. This makes them far more likely to oppose policies like affirmative action and immigration and to support right-wing policies. Nor is this unique to the United States but is, rather, a “universal element” of contemporary fascist politics. Because nationalism (not nationalism in pursuit of equality but nationalism in pursuit of domination) is at the core of fascism, the fascist leader uses a sense of “collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity” (106). Whether based on skin color, religion, or ethnic origin, it always situates itself as guarding against an invasive “them” in order to restore the safety and dignity of the dominant group, “us,’ whose sense of loss it always exaggerates. As he did in an October 2017 speech at the International Consultation on Christian Persecution, Viktor Orban of Hungary railed against the “danger” to Europe’s Christian roots represented by soft immigration policies: 

“A group of Europe’s intellectual and political leaders wishes to create a mixed society in Europe which, within just a few generations, will utterly transform the cultural and ethnic composition of our continent—and consequently its Christian identity” (107). 

As victims of such unfair persecution, Orban urges Hungarians to join him in thwarting this “invasion” fostered by liberal elites, and revive Hungary’s traditional (mythic) role as the defender of Christian Europe against barbarian hordes. 

            Perhaps Law and Order is the most familiar tactic used by fascist politics. But what is interesting about Stanley’s take is that members of the target group are not only characterized as “criminals,” though that is bad enough; it also represents them as threats to the nation’s purity. This was particularly poisonous in Nazi Germany, but it reigned supreme in the American South as well. The underlying threat, of course, is the threat of rape, which threatens not only women themselves, but the actual “manhood” of the nation. This is why this tactic plays directly into the next one, Sexual Anxiety. With the “leader” depicted as the “father of the nation,” any threat to male control and family traditions also threatens the fascist view of male dominance and strength. According to Hitler, “Jews were behind a conspiracy to rape pure Aryan woman as a means of destroying the ‘white race’” (129). The Ku Klux Klan apparently shared this theory, referring to the Negro goal of “destroying by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race which they hate” (129). It goes without saying that the danger posed by black rapists was also at the heart of the rampage of lynching that marked the Jim Crow era. 

            Finally, fascist politics takes on both the corruption of cities—Sodom and Gomorrah where outsiders usually concentrate and, like parasites, depend on the largesse of the state—and the contrast between the “hard work” ethic of the countryside and the laziness marked by immigrants and urban dwellers. What’s most damaging about this mythology, according to Stanley, is that fascist movements actually attempt to make their mythic constructions about “them” into actuality by using social policies to do it. By driving Jews out of Germany, the Nazis believed that turning Jews into refugee beggars would prove their fascist contention that Jews were naturally shiftless and lazy. In the same way, American policies in Latin American countries like Honduras and Guatemala turn large populations into migrants, who then, as immigrants, can confirm the fascist contention that they are lazy and dependent on state aid. And for the native population, destroying labor unions, instituting ‘tough on crime’ policies, and fostering the economic inequality that grows more threatening in the U.S. each year also acts as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy—that “those people” are simply lazy and deserve their lot. 

In his epilogue, Stanley sums up what he has pointed out in this short but powerful, thought-provoking book:

The mechanisms of fascist politics all build on and support one another. They weave a myth of a distinction between “us” and “them,” based on a romanticized fictional past featuring “us” and not “them,” and supported by a resentment for a corrupt liberal elite, who take our hard-earned money and threaten our traditions. “They” are lazy criminals on whom freedom would be wasted (and who don’t deserve it, in any case). “They” mask their destructive goals with the language of liberalism, or “social justice,” and are out to destroy our culture and traditions and make “us” weak (187). 

That’s it in a nutshell. And for those who think that “it can’t happen here,” this little book should be an eye-opener and a wakeup call because, as they say, we’re already half-way there.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Last Syllable of Recorded Time

What time is it? Most of us ask this question unthinkingly, several times a day. Time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to work, to watch the news, and so on. But we are reminded recurrently—as on New Year’s Eve, for example—that clock time differs depending on where you live on the planet. Revelers in Australia are already celebrating the New Year while we in America still have hours to go before the Times Square ball drops (and if you’re in California, the ball has already dropped at nine o’clock, but our TV channels kindly re-run the tape for us at midnight Pacific Time.) So even the dullest of us knows that time is different—but regularlydifferent—in different time zones; and that the “now” I am experiencing at this moment is the same as everyone’s “now” no matter what the clock says in different parts of the globe. 

            Now comes Carlo Rovelli, a physicist whose specialty is ‘loop quantum gravity,’ to disabuse us of even this simple notion. Time is not at all simple, Rovelli tells us in his new book The Order of Time, (Penguin: 2018), and in fact may not even exist. And there is no “now” that prevails throughout the universe. At one point he even says it plainly: “The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance” (140). 

            To summarize what Rovelli means is not easy, and I’m not sure I understand many of his arguments, beautifully phrased as they are. But here is what I can more or less comprehend. First, he gives us a brief lesson in the history of speculations about time. Aristotle was the first to ask himself ‘what is time?’ and he concluded that “time is the measurement of change.” Pretty good. We can all see the logic in that. But Newton disagreed, and reached the opposite conclusion. Regardless of objects and the changes in them and in our world, there is something called “true time,” said Newton. This is the time, perceived and measured by physicists with their instruments, that goes steadily on regardless of whether things are changing or not. All of Newton’s principles and theories (and our clocks) depend on this notion of time. But, of course, along came Einstein, and he upset Newton’s sensible notions once again when he introduced his notion of space and time as “fields.” As “fields,” space and time become space/time, “the fabric on which the rest of the world is drawn” (74) as Rovelli puts it. And what this means for time is that it is no longer independent, as Newton thought, but relativeand thus, together with space, interacting with the rest of the world. We all know of the example of a twin in space aging more slowly than his sibling on earth because of the differing speeds at which they travel. But very large objects also have a noticeable effect on this fabric of spacetime, which is why clocks run more slowly near large objects: their gravitational fields distort the very fabric of time. Rovelli points out, in this regard, that clocks (very accurate ones) even show time passing more rapidly high on mountaintops than at sea level, due to this effect.  

            Rovelli then takes us into the strange world he studies, quantum mechanics, and tells us how it has, in turn, essentially demolished even the relativity of time Einstein discovered. In quantum mechanics, things get very strange indeed, and, according to Rovelli, so does time. The scale, of course, is beyond our imagining: it is called the Planck scale. For grains of time, Rovelli gives us the figure of 10^-44 seconds, or “a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second” (82). With such infinitesimal units, Rovelli speculates that “the notion of time is no longer valid” and “values of time t do not exist.” Thus, time at this level is not a continuous flow, and our notion of time loses its meaning. When added to the indeterminacy of everything at quantum levels (physicists call this “superposition”), spacetime gets so vague as to be cloudy, fluctuating. And here “even the distinction between present, past, and future becomes fluctuating, indeterminate,” just as with elementary particles. This means, according to Rovelli, that “an event may be both before and after another one” (88). If this doesn’t boggle your mind, you haven’t read that correctly. 

            What I like most about Rovelli is his writing ability and his sense of humor. Consider this little zinger, for example, where he is trying to emphasize his point that the ‘physical substratum’ that determines duration “is a quantum entity that does not have determined values until it interacts with something else” and then onlyfor that specific interaction; “they remain indeterminate for the rest of the universe” (90). It’s like many ‘things’ in the quantum universe: they do not take form as substances until they interact with an observer, until we look at them. In fact, they are better understood as “events” rather than “things.” And these “events” happen in what appears to be not the orderly, past-to-present fashion theorized by Newton or even Einstein, but in a kind of random order that is at best local. Hard to understand, but here is Rovelli’s metaphor to make this more humanly relevant: 

The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians (96). 

You gotta love a physicist, Italian himself, who writes like that. 

            One of Rovelli’s main ideas concerns what he calls “blurring:” this refers to the fact that we cannot see deep into matter, into what is going on at the quantum level, so our vision of the world is ‘blurred.’ Rovelli writes it this way: “the quantum indeterminacy of things produces a blurring,” even when we think we can measure everything. He goes on, 

Both the sources of blurring—quantum indeterminacy, and the fact that physical systems are composed of zillions of molecules—are at the heart of time. Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world (140).

So while we “see” a universe which “began” with the Big Bang and its low entropy state (which in turn produces our sense that greater order [low entropy] leads to greater disorder [higher entropy], to past preceding present preceding future—hence our sense of the ineluctable order of time), Rovelli maintains that all of this may be “more down to us than to the universe itself.” In other words, the universe in time appears as it does because of who we are, not how the world is. Here is how he concludes this line of thought:

The low initial entropy of the universe might be due to the particular way in which we—the physical system that we are part of—interact with it. We are attuned to a very particular subset of aspects of the universe, and it is thisthat is oriented to time (147). 

This is significant because everything that we know of proceeds from the growth of entropy; from, that is, sources of low entropy like our sun which is constantly breaking down due to its nuclear burning, but whose breaking down, or entropy, gives us the light on which we and all organisms depend. And of course, the low entropy of the sun comes from “an entropic configuration that was even lower: the primordial cloud from which the solar system was formed” (160), and that low entropy comes from other sources back to the low initial entropy of the universe at the Big Bang. This is the “great story of the cosmos” says Rovelli, the story of time powered by the growth of entropy. And it is the particular story which we, as humans, have become sensitive to, and aware of. A great story, no doubt about it, a story of causality, memory, the history of the happenings of the world, in short, the world in time, but a very limited story, only one story out of many. In short, Rovelli says, our sense of time is peculiar to us and necessarily ignores the vast, timeless goings-on at microscopic levels of which we are mostly unaware. Citing St. Augustine, Rovelli summarizes it thus: “this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation” (182). 

            There is more in this fascinating and often beautiful book, but to do it justice requires a leisurely reading, and reflection, and probably re-reading. Reading it like this will change your view of time, at least in part, and perhaps make you reflect on how little we truly know about time and its last syllables and what exactly it is that we are recording. 

Lawrence DiStasi

America's Toxic Legacy

Sunday as I was driving, I heard a radio piece via “On the Media” with Brooke Gladstone, discussing the work of lawyer Bryan Stephenson. I knew I was in for a treat because I’d heard Bryan Stephenson before and considered him one of the most impressive African-American activists I’d ever come across. I’d seen his powerful National Memorial for Peace and Justicein a Newshour report when it opened, and knew of that too. But I’d never heard the specific take I was hearing in this “On the Media” segment—finding out only online that it was called “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done,” a phrase that comes from Stephenson’s idea that people are not the same as, and cannot be identified with ‘the worst thing they’ve ever done.’ He uses this principle in his law practice, which often consists of defending black teenagers, 13- and 14-year-olds who are condemned, in his home state of Alabama, to life in prison for crimes committed when they are children. Stephenson’s general point is that no one can be forever identified and judged by a single act done in a single moment. His Equal Justice Initiativetakes a similar stand, arguing that the incarceration of so many Black young men—the figures are horrifying, amounting to huge percentages of young Black men who are either in prison (incarcerated at 5 times the rate of whites), or on parole far beyond their representation in the population as a whole—equates to a continuing miscarriage of justice that essentially extends slavery to our present day. And that constitutes his other major argument: while most Americans think that the original crime of slavery ended in America with the Civil War, in actual fact, the racist war against ‘freed’ slaves simply continued in another form—especially the constant lynching that Stephenson specifically labels “terrorism.” And one of the points he makes is that it was not only poor black men who were terrorized by lynching; often it was freedmen and women who had become economically successful, a sin against white power almost as great, in white post-Civil War America, as eyeing a white woman. 

            But to get to the real point of Stephenson’s ideas in “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done,” what he has been arguing all along is that Americans have never come to terms with the outrages against African Americans not only of slavery, but of the more than 4,000 lynchings (Stephenson emphasizes repeatedly that this was literal ‘terrorism,’ long before 9/11) that continued those outrages virtually to the 1950s (and continue today in mass incarceration). Indeed, Stephenson repeatedly maintains that slavery, horrible as it was, wasn’t the most egregious crime against African-Americans. The most long-lasting crime (one that, as anyone can easily see, is continuing and given encouragement by the current President of the United States) was the notion that was used to justify it, both pre- and post-Civil War. This was the notion that Whites were simply following nature in enslaving Blacks, that Whites were naturally superior, and that Blacks could never—freed or not—be considered equal and hence deserving of equal rights, equal opportunities, or equal justice. What this means is that America itself has never, not ever, come to terms with its past—especially when compared to apartheid South Africa, or Germany regarding its Nazi era. To make this point, Gladstone in her radio segment interviews several current residents of Germany, and they highlight the numerous monuments erected in Germany to memorialize and constantly remind Germans of the extermination of Jews in the Nazi death camps. One such reminder is the Holocaust Memorial that sits smack in the center of Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate—making it impossible for any German to ignore what took place. This reminder of and confrontation with the past—and thereby its acknowledgment—simply cannot be avoided by modern Germans, and thus makes it almost impossible to deny (though some neo-Nazis these days have been trying.)  

         Comparing this German example to the situation in the United States then becomes deeply instructive. In the American South, for example, monuments to Civil War “heroes” are everywhere, including Stephenson’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. Civil War generals are everywhere memorialized and spoken of with reverence. Families take great pride in the deeds of ancestors who “fought the good fight” for the “noble cause.” This would simply be unthinkable—to publicly and proudly idealize Hitler or Eichmann or Goebbels—in Germany. And yet heroic statues of confederate General Robert E. Lee are found throughout the American South (it is no accident that the one in Charlottesville VA became the center of the white supremacist riots there in 2017). In Montgomery, the most active slave-trading port in the South, there are many such markers, including the “first White House of the Confederacy where Jefferson Davis lived until 1861” (“A Visit to Montgomery’s Legacy Museum,” TheNew Yorker: July 17, 2018.) 

            This is precisely what Bryan Stephenson and his EJI (Equal Justice Initiative) set about to remedy with his Legacy Museumand National Memorial for Peace and Justicein Montgomery. The Memorial has been covered in several pieces, including the above-mentioned one in The New Yorker. It is a powerful piece of symbolism that makes vivid, on steel slabs hanging from the ceiling, 816 of the more than 4,000 lynchings Stephenson and his team have found and documented. The viewer, as Brooke Gladstone testifies in her piece, has to look up, as he or she would have to look upward to see a black body lynched in a tree. To further emphasize the lynchings, Stephenson has placed in the Legacy Museum(itself sited in a warehouse formerly used as a slave market) small Mason jars filled with soil taken from the site of single lynchings throughout the South and beyond. Each jar is labeled with the name of the victim, the date of death, and the county where the lynching took place. Some jars are accompanied by related videos: John Hartfield, accused of assaulting a white woman, was captured and kept alive by a doctor until, on June 26, 1919, 10,000 people from Ellisville, Mississippi could gather in a festive crowd to watch him be hanged, have his dead body riddled with 2,000 bullets, and then burned, while jubilant spectators passed around his severed fingers. The intention of the soil jars is to persuade (or shame) each community to place a monument to memorialize this dark part of its past, for only by doing so, according to Stephenson, can the United States as a whole begin the process of acknowledging and coming to terms with the original sins of its long-denied past. Only in this way can some sort of reconciliation and truth begin the process of national healing, the process of “liberation” as Stephenson puts it. 

            Only in this way, in short, can the false notion that slavery was merely the South’s ‘peculiar institution,’ a necessary and justified economic option for an agricultural South that a ‘noble’ war tried to preserve, be repudiated. Only in this way can the never-abandoned ideology of ‘white supremacy’—the real ‘toxin’ that has poisoned our nation, according to Stephenson—be buried once and for all. Only in this way can the people of the United States come to terms with the truth about the persistence of this ideology, with the underlying racism that not only allowed slavery to take hold in the South, but also allowed thousands of lynchings to erupt in the Jim Crow era that followed ‘emancipation’ and persist virtually to the present day. Indeed, if there is something “exceptional” about this nation that Americans may rightly claim, this may be it. For as the crusading Black journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in a speech in 1909:

No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals. Only under the stars and stripes is the human Holocaust possible.(cited by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, May 4, 2018). 

To be sure, no American with even a rudimentary moral sense would want to claim such a legacy. For precisely that reason, it is something every American should hear about in detail, hear about and face and internalize in such a way that the poisonous crime of white supremacy underlying it might be extirpated without reserve, forever. With his graphic Memorial and Museum, that is precisely what Bryan Stephenson is trying to get all of America to face in its full depth and horror. God knows it is about time. 

Lawrence DiStasi

for reference:

Dec. 28, 2018 On the Media: “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done.”

Bryan Stephenson TED talk: “We Need to talk about an Injustice,” Mar. 4, 2014. 

Allyson Hobbs and Nell Freudenberger, “A Visit to Montgomery’s Legacy Museum,” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/a-visit-to-montgomerys-legacy-museum