2021 has been a tumultuous year, from insurrection to repeated, concerted attacks on voting rights, reproductive healthcare, trans youth, and antiracism to name a few. As we reach the midpoint in President Biden's first year and amidst an ongoing war of attrition against democracy being waged on the Right, Breaking News from PRA’s Frederick Clarkson and Ben Lorber reinforce just how much work is left to do to block the far-right from moving further into the mainstream.
Frederick Clarkson discovered evidence this year that the Christian Right Bill Mill Project Blitz is back and more secretive than ever.
Ben Lorber documents how new Gen-Z influencers are building momentum for White nationalism in the post-Trump era.
Read PRA's breaking analysis of trends on the Right; stay tuned for our upcoming Spring/Summer 2021 issue of The Public Eye featuring long-form investigations into the Incel and Trad Girls movements and QAnon apocalypticism; and watch the recordings of our latest webinar series for expert perspectives on the state of the Right today and the way forward for social justice movements.
In solidarity as we move ever forward,
The PRA Team
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By Frederick Clarkson, July 16, 2021
- Originally published by Religion Dispatches on July 12, 2021 -
In the Fall of 2019, the secretive Christian Right state legislative campaign, Project Blitz, became even more of a secret. When RD first reported on Project Blitz in April 2018 the website featured their annual state legislative playbook of model bills and talking points. They also named the members of the State Legislative Prayer Caucuses that drew on the model bills for their own legislation. But in the face of public scrutiny, RD’s revelation of a second playbook and the unwanted media attention that followed our reports (from The New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, Religion News Service, USA Today, Church & State magazine and many more) the sponsoring Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (CPCF) scrubbed everything under the rubric of Project Blitz from their site. One Ohio state senator went so far as to lie to a reporter about even knowing about Project Blitz—despite being the state’s co-chair.
The Project Blitz playbooks for the state legislative sessions of 2019-2020 and 2020-21 remained hidden—until now. They’ve added some new bills—including a dramatic attack on the integrity of public libraries—but the Dominionism-driven Christian nationalist agenda remains the same. The playbooks advise legislators to cloak their religious mission in the guise of more secular intentions and they’ve renamed several bills to make them sound more appealing.
But the newly-surfaced playbooks also tell a story of...Continue Reading Here.
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By Ben Lorber, July 20, 2021
On Monday, July 19, 2021 in Tampa, Florida, as the Student Action Summit of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) drew to a close, a new Generation Z group called the American Populist Union (APU) held its inaugural conference just down the street. APU co-founder Vince Dao told a crowd of over 100 young conservatives at the American Populist Summit, “I’m literally 18 years old, we put this together like a month ago, and the energy in this room is insane–we don’t even have enough chairs!”
Nick Fuentes and his America First/groyper movement pulled a similar stunt in December 2019, holding their own Groyper Leadership Summit in a hotel just down the street from TPUSA’s Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida. Much like the American Populist Union, the groypers branded themselves as the authentic Generation Z conservative vanguard, championing an immigration moratorium, a virulent culture war against LGBTQ rights, and hardline ultranationalism over and against what they regarded as the corrupt, globalist conservative establishment. Fuentes’ movement has opened space on the Right for White nationalist politics to gain traction in the mainstream, and secured the endorsement of U.S. Representative Paul Gosar (AZ-4) in the process.
Now, the American Populist Union seeks to widen the margin...Continue Reading Here.
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In Case You Missed It
PRA held it's final webinar of our five-part series It's Not Over Yet this past Thursday:
Mobilizing for Reproductive Freedom in the Battle for Bodily Sovereignty
Under the perceived threat of a Democratic administration stymieing the war of attrition against reproductive rights, the anti-abortion movement continues to strategize for a post-Roe future. From the growth of the abortion abolitionist movement to the anti-abortion agenda of armed paramilitaries, the battle over bodily sovereignty continues. Watch as a convening of experts on the anti-abortion movement and practitioners committed to building access to reproductive care take stock of this current moment in the struggle for reproductive freedom.
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For an interactive version of this illustration, visit our website here.
You can also read the transcript of the webinar here.
Featuring:
Moderated by Koki Mendis.
A few places where you can help resource reproductive healthcare:
Abortion Access Front - AAF is the reproductive rights joint that uses humor and outrage to fight back online and on the ground against enemies of reproductive freedom. Part USO, part Habitat for Humanity, AAF is the only non profit that travels the country doing comedy and providing aid and comfort to independent clinics in hostile states.
Carolina Abortion Fund - CAF works directly with clinics to provide grants that fill the gap between what patients can afford and the full cost of the procedure.
National Network of Abortion Funds - Member organizations work across our network to remove financial and logistical barriers to abortion access. Some of them work with clinics to help pay for your abortion. Some of them offer support such as transportation, childcare, translation, doula services, and somewhere to stay if you have to travel to get your abortion. NNAF provides leadership development, infrastructure support, and organizing technical assistance to our members.
Find your local abortion and reproductive healthcare funds here to donate in your community.
"Women will always take care of themselves no matter what the law, church or state, says. That’s what we always do...Where’s our building up of our underground muscle, our transportation, where is the Underground Railroad we’re going to obviously need? Those are the kinds of things we need to put into place to close the gap between fighting at the legislative or legal level, and making sure people don’t die." - Loretta Ross
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Word on the street is...
Watch the recordings of PRA's latest webinar series It's Not Over Yet to understand where experts of right-wing movements and social justice movement leaders are focusing their attentions in the months ahead.
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"Settler colonialism is a contemporaneous problem, it’s a current problem, that is structuring our relationship with the environment. And also is fundamentally a right-wing problem" - Andrew Curley, University of Arizona
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"The biggest disinformation campaign being wielded is the one that blankets people who are on the Far Right, or curious about the Far Right, in a sense of love, community, shared struggle against a world that wants to eliminate the White man and end his way of life." - Talia Lavin, journalist
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"There is a horrendous miscalculation by the Left and progressive institutions right now in thinking that this particular trans fight is a marginal one" - Imara Jones, TransLash
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"The availability of good work has diminished and rather than deal with that through investment, and social investment in our collective human capacity, we've dealt with it through punishment that builds on, deepens, and reinscribes the racial hierarchies in this country" - Gabriel Winant, University of Chicago
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"We’re dealing with the fight against White supremacy, not Whiteness as an identity. And so it’s been long overdue for us to recognize that White supremacist opposition to abortion actually is very racially specific. What they’re trying to do is prevent White women from accessing abortions." - Loretta Ross, Smith College
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New from PRA
The unique dynamics of the occupation of the West Bank, the political and territorial erasure of Palestinians, and the conflicted history of Zionism renders Israeli right-wing politics both unique and unstable.
Border Fascism continues to evolve under the Biden administration with the Right in opposition - Brendan O'Connor speaks to the evolution of this movement both in an out of power and some scenarios for what's on the horizon.
In an excerpt from his new book, Burley highlights how Antifa has become a stand-in for every cultural trend the Right finds frightening and argues for a vision for the future in which antifascism is not just a resistance but a future in its own right.
Recent events in New York state shine a spotlight on the growing alignment of the anti-vaccination movement and a constellation of far-right movements, including the anti-abortion and militia movements.
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New From Religion Dispatches
"By rejecting reform or claiming that social justice is somehow antithetical to the gospel...white evangelicalism simultaneously reifies and erodes its base. People will defect and leave the fold."
Wessinger deploys the concept and history of "millennialism" or the belief in “an imminent transition to a collective salvation, in which the faithful will experience well-being and the unpleasant limitations of the human condition will be eliminated” to refute the use of "cult" to describe three significant contemporary right-wing political movements.
Stroop pens a comprehensive and persuasive response to a reader letter demonstrating why "having the right to hold certain views is not the same, in a free society, as being immune from the criticism of those views. Nor does it mean that whatever views we may hold are unharmful, or equivalently valid to the opposite views. Ideas, after all, have consequences."
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For more analysis and resources, browse our most recent articles and 40-year archive on our website.
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