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Dispatches From the Culture Wars - Topsy Turvy edition

GOP tops cornered; Evangelicals choose love; ISIS in Brooklyn; White poverty; French apartheid

Kids in Sevran, a northeastern suburb of Paris.,Photo via Flickr


After 2012, the GOP Set Out to Be More Inclusive. What Happened?

By Jacob Heilbrunn
November 21, 2015
Politico

After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, touted his shiny new 100-page report on reinventing the GOP at the National Press Club in March 2013. It was called the “Growth and Opportunity Project.” Priebus’ message was earnest and direct: The GOP needed to practice inclusion, not exclusion, if it was to have any chance of winning the presidency. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too,” the report said. “We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities. But it is not just tone that counts. Policy always matters.”
That was then. In the meantime, the GOP’s leading presidential contenders have serially and successfully thumbed their collective noses at the party establishment.


Christian Groups Break With GOP Over Syrian Refugees

By Nahal Toosi
November 17, 2015
Politico

Faith-based groups, who play a key role in resettling refugees to the United States, say they are dismayed by the wave of anti-refugee fervor set off by the Paris terrorist attacks and are urging supporters to contact elected officials on behalf of victims of the Syrian civil war.
Evangelical Christians, as well as Christians more broadly, are a core group in the Republican electoral base and are among the most passionate advocates for aiding refugees.


ISIS at the Gyro King

By Mark Jacobson
November 5, 2015
New York Magazine

The Brooklyn Uzbeks seemed to be in a daze, as if they had no idea what had hit them. Immigrants who’d arrived in New York during the mid-to-late aughts, until quite recently they’d hung out on Coney Island Avenue, their days largely filled with the drudgery of working in gyro stands in Midwood and Kensington and selling sunglasses to nonbelievers in tacky suburban malls. This was what they knew of the polluted realm of the kafir.
Sometime during 2014, according to federal authorities, the two young Uzbeks charted a different destiny for themselves. They began sending jihadist messages on Uzbek-language websites and watching videos of holy warriors chopping off heads. They were going to join the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS.

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America's Poorest White Town: Abandoned by Coal, Swallowed by Drugs

By Chris McGreal
November 12, 2015
The Guardian

A plague gripping the isolated, fading towns dotting this part of Appalachia. Frontier communities steeped in the myth of self-reliance are now blighted by addiction to opioids – “hillbilly heroin” to those who use them. It’s a dependency bound up with economic despair and financed in part by the same welfare system that is staving off economic collapse across much of eastern Kentucky. It’s a crisis that crosses generations.
One of those communities is Beattyville, recorded by a US census survey as the poorest white town – 98% of its 1,700 residents are white – in the country. It was also by one measure – the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2008-2012 of communities of more than 1,000 people, the latest statistics available at the time of reporting – among the four lowest income towns in the country.


There's an Apartheid in France and the Paris Attacks Could Make It Worse

By Antoine Hasday
November 20, 2015
Vice

When he's not campaigning for the de-Christianization of French public holidays or lobbying against the Security Intelligence Act, political analyst Thomas Guénolé writes. In his 2015 book Les Jeunes de Banlieue Mangent-ils Les Enfants?—or Do Banlieue Youth Eat Children?—he tackles the prejudice faced by young people living in French suburban ghettos—also known as the banlieue.
Nowhere can this prejudice be summed up more succinctly than by French rap group La Rumeur's song "I Am An Ethnic Gang Myself Alone." "Hooligan, fundamentalist, barbarian, rioter, terrorist, bastard, savage," they spit, reeling off the labels thrown at them. And now, in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks, the subsequent raids in the Saint-Denis suburbs and the state of emergency declared by François Hollande, kids in Paris' banlieue will be even more under the spotlight.