What books/articles/films/exhibits/images/music/skills/strategies will you be teaching this semester or next to help your students address the rise and presidency of Donald Trump?

What I’ve been teaching this fall in my senior research course: Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class, and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  Yeah, I chose them back in March, when this whole mess was just beginning. Prescient, no? And, yes, I’m sure they are sick of the topic. 

Send me a photo of your stack of books, a list of citations to articles, a screen shot from the movies you will be screening with students, a copy of an assignment (or any other thing that can be shared), either by responding in the comments or via email to rbarrettfox@astate.edu. I’ll share what you share with readers in the next few weeks. Please send ’em by December 1. If you share, I’ll put your name in a hat (or maybe my favorite online random number generator) and pull a winner for a secret and totally awesome prize. Open to teachers and teacher-types (Sunday school teachers, piano teachers, yoga teachers, book club leaders, homeschoolers…) of all kinds.

Will your prize be as totally awesome as 2006’s Totally Awesome starring Chris Kattan and Tracy Morgan? Even if not, you have the satisfaction of knowing you are inspiring other teachers by sharing your ideas. 

If you’re a fellow FiveThirtyEight junkie (or hater), you have probably been looking at a lot of electoral maps lately. I thought that, rather than worrying about it (or maybe in addition to worrying about it), it would be fun to have a little contest.

Let’s see if any of/how many of us can beat Nate Silver.

Above, a political cartoon shows a map of the United States with swing states Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida disproportionately large. The cartoon is titled “Map of the U.S. (As Viewed by the Presidential Candidates.”

Before midnight tonight, post your best electoral college forecast in the comments section of this post. You can visit a number of map-making website for help. (Please don’t just list states! A map  is most helpful here.) Once the final count is in, I’ll send whoever calls the greatest number of states right a prize. So be sure to either leave your name here, PM on Facebook, or email me at rbarrettfox@astate.edu. If you win, I’ll contact you with details about your awesome reward.

Of the many wonderful lyrics John Prine has written, one of my favorites comes from “Grandpa was a Carpenter,” from Sweet Revenge. In the autobiographical recollection of his grandfather, Prine remembers that the great man “voted for Eisenhower/ ’Cause Lincoln won the war.”

John Prine performs “Grandpa was a Carpenter,” 1983

As a lover of Lincoln and other great Civil War and Reconstruction Era Republicans—Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and Robert Smalls being among my heroes—I am charmed by Prine’s portrait of his grandpa, who died in the mid-50s, before the Republican party laid Lincoln’s mantle down in pursuit of the “Southern strategy”—fostering white resentment to solidify white voters, particularly those whose economic interests would otherwise align them with Democrats.

Robert Smalls, former slave turned statesman

Ten years ago, the Republican Party issued “an empty apology,” in the words of NYT columnist Bob Herbert, for the strategy, but it never changed course. Indeed, Donald Trump’s rise to prominence relied on the racist appeals put into place decades ago—back when “Grandpa was a Carpenter” came out, in 1973, just after the re-election of Nixon, who, in the words of his Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, knew that  “[t]he key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.”  That is Prine’s humor–to sing, in the midst of Nixon’s brutal politics, about a man who loved Lincoln and so supported Eisenhower.

Eisenhower’s choice to run saved the nation from the worst of the Republican Party. The general was praised by Democratic leaders during World War II and by sitting president Harry S Truman, who urged him to run in the presidential races immediately after the war and was disappointed when the general chose to run as a Republican. Eisenhower, capitulating to the Draft Eisenhower movement, had chosen to run against Robert A. Taft, a conservative Republican who had worked against the New Deal and against labor and who held isolationist ideas about foreign policy. By running as Republican, he put himself into competition with Taft during the primary, insuring that Taft wouldn’t get the opportunity to be on the presidential ticket. The bitter primary race and Republican convention made clear what was at stake: the domination of the Democrats (who had been in power for decades) that would likely continue if Taft was placed on the ballot, or the possibility of the popular war hero bringing a moderate Republican party into office. Eisenhower narrowly won the primary race, setting the stage for an overwhelming victory against Adlai Stevens, who lost, for the first time since Reconstruction, a few Southern states (Florida, Texas, and Virginia) to the Republican victor.

Eisenhower’s boyhood home in Abilene, Kansas, a state that has, in the past, fostered some of the best progressive, pragmatic leadership in the nation. Not now. 

But within a little more than a decade, Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon, would dramatically reshape politics, making a vote for the Republican party an affront to the memory of Lincoln and securing the South for the GOP for a long time–though this may be changing.

In the 2016 primary, no Republican would do what Eisenhower had been willing to do—serve in order to prevent the nation from veering too far to the right. The conventional wisdom has become that the primary election is where candidates are most polarized, that they will veer more to the center post-primary, when they are no longer mostly concerned about getting out the base of voters who bother to show up for primary elections but instead want to appeal to a wider pool of voters. Eisenhower did just the opposite, bringing his party into the White House for the first time in decades because he was willing to be moderate. His moderation on issues of Civil Rights has tarnished his legacy (though he was the strongest advocate of Civil Rights since Lincoln) but that moderation also allowed him gravity when he did use presidential power, as he did when he forcibly integrated Central High School in Little Rock by federalizing the state’s national guard. In these ways, he was very much like Lincoln—committed to unity for as long as he could be, then able to use force effectively.

Today’s Republican party would be unrecognizable to Lincoln, Eisenhower, or Prine’s grandfather. This is why Trump calls up the ghosts of General George MacArthur in his warmongering speeches but not Eisenhower, saying that that MacArthur is “spinning in his grave” at America’s international leadership. But MacArthur, brash with threats of nuclear war, inconsiderate of the cost of war, dismissive of the presidency and elected office, and irresponsible with his words, is not the general we want our leaders to emulate.  It’s not a surprise, though, that he’s the person Trump picks to hold up.

Lincoln, who won loyalty to the Republican party for generations, for good reasons

If Lincoln won the Republican party nearly 100 years of loyalty, Trump risks losing the party for generations. I’ve been a Republican voter, particularly in local elections where political philosophy matters less than expertise in governance. I’ve been a registered Republican as recently as the 2012 election. (Granted, this was in a region of the country where the local Democrats urged like-minded folks to register Republican to vote in the primary election for the Eisenhower-like figure, knowing that that person, not the Democrat—if one was even running—would win. In fact, it was in Kansas, Eisenhower’s birthplace, now a disaster because of Republican politicians.) But, to repay the Republican party for inflicting Donald Trump on us, I will never ever ever vote for a Republican again, not for dogcatcher or county coroner, not if his opponent is a turd sandwich. And I resent that my loyalty can’t be to a transformational figure, like Lincoln, but to my rage at a Republican party willing to sacrifice women, Muslims, African Americans, Jews, and immigrants rather than reject its own worst elements.

On mid-October, three militia members attempted to blow up a housing complex in Garden City, Kansas. Their hope was to destroy the complex, which houses many Muslim Somali immigrants, on November 9, the day after the election, the same day former Representative and general deadbeat Joe Walsh said loser Republicans should “grab a musket” to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. The three domestic terrorists,* all from Kansas, targeted the complex because of their hatred for immigrants, Somalis, and Muslims. They wanted to insure “a bloodbath,” killing everyone, including infants, and modeling their planned attack on Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City.

Their rhetoric is drawn directly from rightwing militia groups and white supremacists. They called their group the Crusaders—a reference to the medieval Christians who sought to regain the Holy Land from Muslims, destroying Muslim and Orthodox Christian communities and artifacts in the process. The crusader is also a trope that appears regularly in white supremacy, including in literature and on websites. [I’m not hyperlinking to one of their websites.  The Crusader is one of the major themes I’ve identified in my own work on the YouTube archives of the Aryan Nations; if you want sources, contact me and I’ll happily share. This research is currently funded by the National Institute of Justice.**] These domestic terrorists did not come across this image by accident but because they are white supremacists who saw their targets—because they are immigrants, because they are Muslims, because they are Somalis, because they are black—as “cockroaches.”

But this language and these images aren’t just part of the work of the KKK, neo-Nazis, and Aryan Nations. It is also the language of the Republican Party, from Donald Trump on down. Hillary Clinton noted in her speech about Trump’s embrace of the alt-right that “what he’s doing… is more sinister” than simple racism.  It’s empowering the worst, most violent, bigots to act.

It’s why violence against Muslims has been rising ever since he arrived on the scene.

It’s why Hussain Saeed Alnahdi, a Saudi engineering student, is dead.

But the problem isn’t Trump’s alone. It belongs to the Republican Party more broadly.

Just days after the plans to bomb Garden City were interrupted by the FBI, the Kansas GOP chose to send out campaign flyers equating Muslims in the state with ISIS. The flyers include a windmill, a symbol of Kansas’ farming history, with the ISIS flag in the center of the page. The right-hand quarter of the page is an image of brown-skinned man, all but his eyes covered by a keffiyeh. The mailer ominously asks “Have you met the new neighbors?”

Above, Kansas Republicans’ mailers. The state party used focus groups to determine that “the whole feeling that’s there violence out there” helps drive Republican turnout. Yes, that’s right–they are stoking fear among non-Muslims and provoking violence against Muslims to win elections, not because there is anything to fear.  And they have been very open about this strategy, giving interviews to the Wichita Eagle.

Kansas have some reasonable concerns about unwanted Muslim “immigrants.” Guantanamo detainees may be released to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in the eastern part of the state.

But that’s not the worry here.

And it’s not the worry in the other mailers they Kansas GOP has sent—pictures of beautiful blonde-haired children worrying “What is ISIS? Will they hurt me?” and, also with a little white girl, this one holding an American flag, explaining that would-be State Representative Joseph Scapa wants you understand that “the first step to keeping Kansas safe is to recognize who the enemy is.” In the corner, the mailer says, “Let’s keep terrorists out of Kansas.”

Anti-Muslim groups have praised the flyers, saying that “one can only hope” [CW: Hate website] they incite more ill-will toward Kansas’ Muslim population.

Senator Brownback showed true Republican leadership (that is, cowardly capitulation to racists) when he withdrew Kansas from the Refugee Resettlement Program State Plan.

But I suspect that Brownback and Scapa, though Republicans, understand that the problem isn’t really Muslims. It’s domestic terrorists—homegrown Americans, white Christians, who are bringing their votes to the GOP, along with their violent racism. But Republicans are benefitting—and with no cost to anyone but people they dislike anyway—from that racism, so they let it go—and, perhaps, they are genuinely afraid of the monsters they’ve empowered. They are engaged in classic victim-blaming, saying that they will fight domestic terrorists (who are, by and large, white men) by banning immigrants and refugees.

Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America by Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway addresses the way that Garden City, Kansas, has been supported by immigrant labor in its meatpacking sector. 

The great irony is that Kansas, like the rest of the US, is made stronger, not more vulnerable, by immigrants. At a time of depopulation, particularly in the western region of the state, Garden City thrives because of immigrants—some of them documented and some of them not—come to work in meatpacking there. Like all cities, it has its struggles, but it is also a model of multicultural cooperation in many ways.  The community is rich with conversation about how different people can work together to strengthen the city and the state.

The problem isn’t just Kansas, and the violence isn’t targeted only at Muslims. Above left, a mosque in Waterloo, Iowa, is vandalized with the word “Trump.” At right, a predominantly black church in Greenville, Mississippi, is burnt and the words “Vote Trump” spray painted on it.

Kansas’ Republicans worry about refugees, who are called “poisonous Skittles” and “rabid dogs,” but the fact is that the state’s demise has not been because of immigrants, refugees, Muslims, or people of color. Highly ideological Republicans’ plan to dismantle public service and undermine the common good is working, just as Brownback (and Grover Norquist) promised—and as residents of the state are noticing, to their dismay.  Tax breaks for the wealthy; restrictions on welfare, including the end of services for some of the state’s most vulnerable; the privatization of parts of Medicaid; destructive cuts to education; massive government layoffs and the closure of important service agencies—all of these have impacted Kansans. The state lacks enough underpaid teachers to staff its public schools. School years are ending early as districts run out of funds. Abused and neglected children are left without help, and child sex abuse investigators are unable to manage their caseloads, leaving children to be repeatedly abused. Highways are in disrepair as infrastructure is ignored.

All of these problems are not problems for Brownback and other Kansas Republicans. They are part of their Tea Party utopia, where the government fails so thoroughly that citizens turn to private resources and the poor die or at least disappear from view. Destroy public schools so private schools can take up the responsibility of educating children. Destroy public health services so that the poor die as the wealthy turn to private medicine.

You have seen this in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq. Walled compounds where the rich hire private tutors to educate their children, private doctors to tend to their health, private drivers to chauffeur them through cities without safe roads, private guards to prevent anyone from breaching their walls of their homes, which are powered by private generators. It’s a Tea Party dream—no government, a fractured country, an America that looks like a “third world” country, one marked by extreme income inequality and widespread poverty. Brought to you not by Muslim immigrants and their sneaking, feared “sharia law” but by the very men Kansas voted into office.

*Including at least one domestic abuser. As always.

**Which I apparently always have to say when I talk about it, according to the NIJ.

Want to send a message of welcome to your neighbors, especially those who have been targeted by Republicans’ extremist rhetoric? Consider buying one of these: 

For Every Mom writer and future Zondervan author Shauna Shanks* has recently published a piece on her blog that really does a fine job of capturing the thinking of many evangelical women who are sticking by Donald Trump.

And I don’t mean that as a compliment. (Though I do mean it as a compliment when I say you should read Kelsey Burke’s piece for Religion Dispatches on the topic. It’s generous and sensitive and just great.)

In “I Don’t Get the Outrage Following Trump’s Lewd Comments and Here’s Why,” Shanks stakes two claims:

• American culture is sexualized and raunchy in ways that demean women.
• Donald Trump is a symptom of our culture.

I agree with Shanks on both claims but not with her effort to link them.

First, every piece of evidence of America’s raunchiness she cites is an example of a woman violating what she considers appropriate sexual norms. NFL cheerleaders, women the red carpet at award shows, teenage girls who dress “to sexually allure,” girls who get cosmetic surgery, models, “dresses with slits up to their bellybuttons and v-necks cut to the same,” the dancing at the Super Bowl halftime show and the dancers’ costumes. When she references specific people, it’s often women of color or white women in relationships with black men—Beyonce and Kim Kardashian. Shanks never once gives an example of a man participating in this kind of culture, nor does she reference specific examples of white people. Anytime a white person chooses only black women for examples of “bad” behavior, you should be getting skeptical about what else they have to say.

To the right, a woman who owns her sexuality. To the left, a man who sexually assaults women and girls. 

Second, while Shanks claims not to be telling people how to vote, she’s drawing from ridiculous examples used by Trump surrogates themselves, all examples taken from hip hop culture, all thus racialized.  As if Donald Trump learned how to publicly comment upon women’s breasts from Nicki Minaj or Rihanna.

Third, Shanks’ comments also ignore the fact that a hypersexualized culture also harms boys and men not just as “consumers” of that culture but as participants in it. Boys, for example, on average engage in sexual activity earlier than girls, with more people, and in riskier circumstances, than girls. If raunch culture is bad for kids, that includes boys, but Shank, the mother of three sons (and no daughters) keeps her focus on what girls are doing wrong. She argues that while it’s the duty of parents to help their kids navigate this stuff, her words do not address what boys need, only the ways that girls become part of the problem of sex in the media. When she does address boys, her focus is on covering their eyes.  Boys seem to be the victim here, while girls are the temptresses—old garbage from purity culture that Shanks seems to want to rise above but can’t quite.

Finally, while the larger problem is a vague “Hollywood and media,” Shanks keeps her focus on women. She says that the problem with football is the “pelvic thrusting, grinding and sex-dancing lingerie-clad performers” but doesn’t mention their terrible, exploitive pay, the large numbers of domestic abusers and sexual assailants held up as sports stars, the racism within the sport, or the known risks that players take with their long-term brain health in order to satisfy fans who equate violence with masculinity. Instead of recognizing that football is dangerous to women (or rather, men who watch football are a danger to them), she focuses on how the few women in football—cheerleaders—interrupt her family’s fun.

Above, NY Giants kicker Josh Brown, on paid leave after admitting to domestic assault. NOT a role model for your kids. 

Below, Alexa Brenneman, a leader in the fight to secure fair wages for NFL cheerleaders. A role model for your kids. 

Now, this isn’t an argument to let your kid do/watch/play anything. Violence against women in song, film, television, and video games can normalize violence and lower inhibitions against violence and disrespect. We know that this is particularly true of pornography. And, in general, I agree with Shanks’ concern that parents must guide their kids through this and that it would be a lot easier if pop culture would relent a bit, give us some space to have a conversation. We can help them make sense of the world because, to quote scholar Janice Radway, “reading”—or watching—“is not eating.” We get to choose how we make sense of the media we engage. It’s hard to do that, as Shanks says, when the visual onslaught, in particular, is so relentless.

And I suspect that Shanks I would agree on a lot of child-rearing strategies and share a lot of the same complaints.

My real beef with Shanks piece is that she sees Donald Trump’s comments about women as a result of the raunchiness of our larger culture, which she keeps illustrating with examples of women taking up hyper-sexualized roles, rather than as a result of a patriarchy that is built upon violence against women; it’s why she blames cheerleaders rather than football. In contrast, I think that purity culture, more so than Beyoncé’s lyrics or dance moves, is a danger.

It’s a culture that says that girls belong to their fathers and women belong to their husbands, who are tasked with protecting their sexual “purity” until a suitable trade—a Christian husband in exchange for a virgin daughter—can be made. It says that a woman’s worth is in her intact hymen (a lie! A damned lie!) and that the great challenge of adolescence is to escape it without having “lost” your mythical “virginity.” It says that boys cannot be blamed for being focused on sex and that it’s girls’ jobs to keep them pure, too. It says that sex is degrading and filthy until, on your wedding night, it magically becomes the most wonderful thing in the world. It says that if you have sex before that, you are worthless, and if you don’t find sex to be the most wonderful thing in the world after that, you’re selfish or lacking in spirituality.

If you wanted to design a culture in which sexual assault flourished, this would be the blueprint: Don’t let women’s bodies belong to them, confusing sex and assault. Make women and men enemies over sex, with women as gatekeepers to men’s sexual pleasure, to which they are entitled by their natures as “alpha males.” Discard women who have sex—and, because you confused sex and assault, discard those who have been assaulted, too. Watch as the quest for purity robs sex of its pleasure, as I Kissed Dating Goodbye author Joshua Harris has been slowly coming to realize.

To the left, a book you don’t want your teenager to read. To the left, a book you don’t want to read, either. 

In short, Christian mothers should worry less about Beyoncé’s invitation to the White House and more about the ways that Christian patriarchy and purity culture set us all up for sexual harm.

Elizabeth Smart, a victim a sexual assault, is the wisest person on the topic.

In an update to her original post, Shanks notes, “Donald Trump’s comments were not only lewd, but what he describes is sexual assault” but then says that this “is NOT what I am talking about in this post.” But her post makes no distinction between Trump’s “lewdness” and his violence (which is why this update was necessary).

Throughout, her argument is that we should expect Trump to behave lewdly because we live in a lewd culture. But, of course, this is not true. Leadership is doing better than your situation requires of you or, in the most heroic cases, even allows.  Both Shanks and I are rearing children in a lewd culture—but we expect them to resist it personally and dismantle it structurally. We can certainly expect the same of a presidential candidate.

But the bigger concern is Shanks’ implication through the piece, despite the updated comment, that lewdness and violence go hand-in-hand. And they don’t, at least not necessarily. Many, many gentlemanly gentlemen are sexual assailants. They are teachers and politicians, grandfathers and uncles, Sunday school teachers and youth pastors, powerful men and less powerful—all made powerful by patriarchy and purity culture. They are heartbroken and scandalized at yoga pants, and they never, ever say “pussy.”

And yet… and yet… and yet…

If you want to learn more about how to protect your children from sexual abuse, consider consulting the work of Dr. Nina Burrowes, who maintains an active YouTube channel focusing on this topic. If your church needs to address sexual assault within its community or work on sexual assault prevention, consider contacting GRACE—Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment. And if you are a survivor of assault and want support, consider reaching out to RAINN, a national network that can help you find local resources.

*I don’t want to pick on Shanks. A lot of evangelical women think this way. She just gets my attention because Zondervan gave her a book contract and thus she has more influence than other Christian mombloggers.