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Political alienation and culture wars rage. So, it came to pass that there was social media chatter before and during the basketball game between Arkansas and Oral Roberts.

Some people were saying on Twitter that they hoped Arkansas lost because it was a state that had just enacted discriminatory legislation against the LGBTQ community. Others were responding that Oral Roberts University was no vehicle for hating on Arkansas, considering that the namesake was a raging homophobe and the current student handbook presumes to bar same-sex activity.

In the end, it was an excellent ballgame.

The dialogue was a microcosm of a broader dynamic Gov. Asa Hutchinson seems to count on.

I asked him over the weekend if he was concerned that his six-year emphasis on modernizing the state's economy had been undercut by his being overrun by an uncontrollable right-wing Legislature sending him culture-war bills he'd managed to stop in years past. These bills could prove damaging to the state's image to would-be modern employers who are committed to diversity and inclusion.

Once these bills got to his office, Hutchinson couldn't stop them because his vetoes can be overridden by a simple majority vote, and this Legislature shows little deference to him. But he could have vetoed them on principle anyway, or let them become law without his signature. He didn't have to sign them, except that he seems to seek continued Republican viability. So, he signed them in the two most-recent cases.

One bill banned something that isn't happening, meaning transgender girls outrunning everyone in track meets. It could be handled if happening by Arkansas Activities Association regulation and any litigation ensuing.

The other allows physicians to cite religious or moral reasons to decline to provide medical care. That could mean refusing to provide care for a transgender person. It could mean declining to provide care to a Donald Trump supporter, clearly a moral position, though that would be a good way for a doctor to go broke in Arkansas.

In both bills, the microscopically small-minded point is to waste legislative time and ink on matters addressing no legitimate public-policy need, but merely allowing pseudo-religious "Christian nationalists" to make themselves feel powerful by abusing their offices to pick on people they don't like or approve of or with whom they disagree.

Hutchinson has said the track-meet bill addresses pre-emptively a conceivable and legitimate concern. He has said the no-treat option for doctors has exceptions for emergencies and couldn't be applied on a basis discriminating against groups.

In other words, he is saying he has managed to come up with rationalizations for signing them.

So, back to my question on whether the governor was concerned his long and diligent attention to modern economic consideration was being undercut: Hutchinson replied without addressing my characterization of his being helplessly overrun by an uncontrollably extreme Legislature. He said instead that these bills weren't all that conspicuous, or will prove not to be as we go along.

He said many states have conscientious exceptions for medical services (most are for abortion alone). He said Tennessee had just passed a transgender-girl athletic bill and measures were pending widely elsewhere.

Forgive me for continuing to rephrase the governor's positions, which could well lead him to stop answering my questions in the first place. But I see a contextual imperative.

In that regard, what the governor is saying is that there's a raging red-state, Trump-allegiant section of the country out there, and Arkansas is but a part of it, and we will not be alone in the occasional enactment of these sorts of laws.

Modern progressive businesses would have to boycott a bunch of them, not just us, presumably.

People may want to root against the Razorbacks, but then they'll find out Oral Roberts is no better, or worse. You see.

But the governor, being an honorable and thoughtful man along with one given to political expedience, did acknowledge as follows: "I am concerned about the overall impression of this session and I hope we can focus attention on the economic, education and reform successes that are being accomplished."

I am not sure what those successes are, but I suspect that the governor's communications staff can prepare nice, thick packets for all of us.

In the meantime, the governor's centerpiece hate-crimes bill seems dead, and I continue to be impressed with the evolving sensibilities of Sen. Jim Hendren, who, in case you haven't heard, is Hutchinson's nephew.

The newborn independent and founder of Common Ground Arkansas tweeted after the dramatic end of the Arkansas-Oral Roberts game: "We should have extended March Madness instead of the legislative session."

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Asa and the culture wars - Arkansas Online

Lil Nas X came out publicly in 2019, but his most recent song, which plays on the conservative theme ... [+] that queerness is a sin, has renewed the conversation about his sexuality.

On Friday, singer Lil Nas X, born Montero Lamar Hill, released Montero (Call Me By Your Name), along with a heartfelt note to his 14-year-old self about coming out. The song, which is about no longer wanting to hide a queer relationship, was accompanied by a video featuring Lil Nas X as various biblical characters and a limited edition run of 666 Satan Shoes, which each contain a drop of human blood and cost $1,018 per pair.

The most genius part of the promotion, though, may not be the shoes or video. As one fan pointed out in a Tweet that was retweeted by the Grammy-award-winning singer, Call me by your name slaps 10x harder knowing how mad people are about it.

The culture war that the song, video and sneakers prompted has caused discussion of the track and singer to skyrocket. Since its release, there have been 1,776,444 tweets mentioning Lil Nas X, according to social analytics platform ListenFirst Media, up from just 50,529 tweets during the same period the week prior.

Montero has been streamed nearly 9 million times on Spotify and became the number 1 song on iTunes. The video has been viewed more than 32 million times on YouTube, where it became the number one trending video over the weekend. On TikTok, the app that propelled Lil Nas X to fame, the first clip of the video has 1.5 million likes. His limited edition Satan Shoes sold out in under one minute.

His older songs are also gaining ground, including his first hit, Old Town Road, which reached 3 billion on-demand streams on Monday. Since Montero was released, Lil Nas X has gained 422,934 new fans, followers or subscribers on his social media accounts, including 200,000 new subscribers on YouTube, according to ListenFirst. Hes also getting support from other musicians, including Miley Cyrus and Big Sean, who commented on one of Lil Nas Xs Instagram posts.

The singer first rose to popularity in 2019, when his song Old Town Road became a viral success on TikTok. The country-rap song spent a record-breaking 19 weeks at No. 1 on Billboards Hot 100. Lil Nas X earned $14 million that year and made Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Lil Nas X publicly came out as gay on Twitter in 2019, but the Montero song and videowhich play on the conservative narrative that LGBTQ+ people will be condemned to hell and that homosexuality is a sinhas sparked fresh commentary about his sexuality and his music.

While fans and music critics are praising the song and video for celebrating queerness, conservative figures like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noam and pundit Candace Owens have taken to Twitter to criticize the song.

We are in a fight for the soul of our nation, Noam tweeted, employing the classic language of culture wars. We need to fight hard. And we need to fight smart. We have to win.

But the heckling from the right has only intensified support from Lil Nas Xs fansparticularly as he responds on social media, discussing the pain that he experienced growing up and suppressing his sexuality, and claps back, riling up the right even more.

ur a whole governor and u on here tweeting about some damn shoes. do ur job! he said, in a Tweet that garnered 183.6 likesseven-times more than Noams Tweet.

you know you did something right when she talks about it, he responded to Candace Owens.

i had 9 months to plan this rollout. yall are not gonna win bro, he tweeted on Monday.

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Lil Nas X's 'Call Me By Your Name' And Satan Shoes Spark A Culture War. It's Paying Off. - Forbes

H.A. Hellyer is a Cambridge University fellow, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

Last week, New Zealand commemorated the Christchurch massacre, with politicians and civil society alike mourning so many who lost their lives when a far-right terrorist killed dozens at mosques in that island nation. But the rhetoric underpinning that terrorist atrocity wasnt as far away from mainstream politics as wed like to think.

Recently, Switzerland narrowly voted in favour of banning face coverings in public, including the burka or niqab worn by Muslim women. The Swiss Peoples Party had campaigned in favour of it with slogans such as Stop Extremism and Stop Islamic Radicalism the latest measure on the European continent that links visible Muslim religious practice to extremism. But it was more than that. As Walter Wobmann, chairman of the referendum committee and a member of parliament for the Swiss Peoples Party, said before the vote: In Switzerland, our tradition is that you show your face. That is a sign of our basic freedoms [facial coverings are] a symbol for this extreme, political Islam which has become increasingly prominent in Europe and which has no place in Switzerland. The measure here is clear Europe is under attack; the main perpetrators of the attack are Muslim; the defence must take them on, by all means necessary.

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Mr. Wobmann wasnt the only European politician to declare as such. I think that Islamo-leftism is eating away at our society as a whole, and universities are not immune and are part of our society, the French Minister for Higher Education Frdrique Vidal declared on Feb. 14. For a Valentines Day message, this was hardly indicative of much warmth or cordiality from the minister rather, it was the latest missive in a pseudo culture war that has been brewing in France for a long time. But this dangerous message was also much more than that and the consequences go far beyond France, and even the West.

The obvious target of the ministers message was parts of the political left in France on the one hand, and portions of the Muslim community on the other. After all, its this specific Islamo-leftism alliance that was particularly named. And thats hardly the first time, whether in France, or elsewhere in the West, where this alliance has been called out. The typical complaint is that substantial parts of the left have not taken seriously enough the issue of extremism that exists among radical both violent and non-violent Islamists, owing to naivety, lack of sophistication, or just pure cultural relativism. That kind of debate and discussion will continue, no doubt, in media, academia and policy.

But thats not what was being targeted in the ministers message. That is a bit of a smokescreen. The French political mainstream has drifted further and further into populism, and that populist fight has led the current president, Emmanuel Macron, and his most threatening political opponent, Marine Le Pen, to just keep doing what theyve been doing out-populist each other. The calculus of Mr. Macron seems to be that he better make it clear he is more serious about national-security threats than Ms. Le Pen is. Which, on the face of it, is hardly a problem, except in the current French context, that translates into focusing on a particular minority religious community. Muslims are that community, which, it would appear, the entire political spectrum sees little penalty in problematizing. And, on the contrary, problematizing the Muslim community would seem to result in increased populist support.

And yes there are historical parallels in Europe, and those parallels are not pretty. The Israeli political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, Amikam Nachmani, notes: The Jew, Europes prototypal other, has now largely been replaced by the Muslim other. Prejudice and discrimination once directed at European Jewry is now aimed at European Muslims. Its not a comfortable comparison to make but it would be foolhardy to ignore, particularly when the calls of never again on the European continent were ignored. Ask the Bosnian Muslims.

The culture wars are real on the continent, and Muslim communities are often simply collateral damage. As Ive argued elsewhere, Muslims arent really all that important in this discussion. They are a useful foil. Mr. Macron isnt really all that worried about Muslims and Islam; he and his government are worried about Ms. Le Pen. The culture wars are less about Muslims per se, and more about our own concerns, as Europeans and Westerners, about who and what we are. In France, that devolves to insecurity around what secularism does or does not mean in the 21st century, but it also leads to wider issues pertaining to the legacy of colonialism, as well as larger culture wars. Thats not even so much simply a left-right issue, as much as it is a search for meaning. And rather than involve Muslim French citizens as integral partners like other communities in that search, they find themselves on the outside of the discussion. No matter what they do.

But this is also not simply about France. On the contrary; there are other examples across the continent and in the wider West. We see it in terrorist attacks, such as the ones that took place in Norway and New Zealand. We see it in the mainstreaming of the radical right, within the Republican Party in the United States, which seems unable to hold back the tide; but also across various centre-right parties, right across the West. There is a spectrum, to be sure but it is a spectrum on a single phenomenon. Its why the New Zealand killer saw Donald Trump as a praiseworthy symbol.

And it goes beyond even the West. A recent attempted attack on a mosque in Singapore was by a supporter of the same far-right discourse; indeed, he explicitly claimed inspiration from the likes of the New Zealand mass murder. Weve gone beyond this being considered a small right-wing fringe it is far more mainstream than that but we have also gone beyond it being limited geographically to the West itself. Its global in a different way altogether.

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There are many parallels between white-supremacist groups and extremist Islamists. But two things arent similar in the slightest. First, we give far more attention to extremist Islamists, despite white supremacy being a more clear and burgeoning threat to the very makeup of our societies. And second, white supremacism is being mainstreamed in ways that extremist Islamism never has been or could be.

It isnt, of course, that the French Higher Education Minister is a white supremacist. But one cant easily disassociate this kind of talk from the Eurarabia discourse a conspiracy theory about a Muslim plot to take over Europe that has been building on the continent for years. As we examine the mainstreaming of the far-right in the years to come, we need to do it with a sense of urgency, because the threat is undeniably on the rise.

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Europes identity crisis: Muslims are collateral damage in the continents culture wars - The Globe and Mail

'Centrism, leaving things much as they are, is no longer practically possible,' says Natalie Bennett

That we have a Far Right government has become clearer than ever this week, demonstrated by events from the release of the Integrated Review of Security to the rush towards the Policing Bill.

What makes that fact harder to identify than usual is that this is not, some individual racists and authoritarians apart, an ideological Far Right government.

It is a Far Right government because it has identified that swooping in that direction, not just pushing the boundaries of what has been considered acceptable mainstream political discourse but smashing through them, is the best way to hold up its vote in the current political landscape.

The driving force is a Trumpian core vote strategy. That doesnt rely on being coherent, on making sense or on bothering about the traditional mainstream of its party, which the leadership assumes will stick with it no matter what (as proved all too true with the US Republican Party).

The strategy only needs to get a relatively small numbers of voters (and crucially social media users) revved up, energised and active. Theyll then do the campaigning work for the government spreading its message. Even many of those made uncomfortable by it will notice and vote while many will turn away from politics entirely in disgust.

This is a strategy that relies on setting up straw men like some kind of threat from a tiny number ofdesperate refugeesrisking their lives to cross the Channel then setting them on fire.

It means announcing a rushed plan for a Policing Bill todemolish basic rights, then letting it drift, content in the knowledge that with the local, regional and national elections (Wales and Scotland) only weeks away, your voters will have seen the signal loud and clear.

In previous times either of those events would have dominated the news for weeks, been analysed, dissected, explained.

But in the Culture Wars, the aim is to just keep flinging weapons. Even nuclear weapons.

The announcement of an increase in the cap in the UKs number of nuclear warheads was met with anger and bemusement from the military establishment from aformer First Sea Lordto aformer SAS chief.

But military figures are on a battleground that their training and experience has not prepared them for, the Culture War. The new nuclear warheads are really not aimed at the Russian or the Chinese, or some shadowy band of cyber warriors, but at explosively heating up our own islands at vaguely reminding voters of Corbynite politics that was so unpopular in Red Wall territory and spreading general fear and loathing.

So what do those opposed to the Far Right do?

Of course we have to call out the behaviour, combat the weapons, allow our anger to be evident. Otherwise the Far Right will become seen as the normal, the standard, the way things have always been. The danger must be named, the reality must be identified.

But theres a great danger in doing that necessary work, one that the military knows well, in fighting your opponent on the ground of their choosing, where theyre always on attack and youre grimly defending.

What also needs to be done is fight back with a different weapon, to open up a different front by setting out a vision of a positive, hopeful, inclusive future, one where we are not an isolated group holed up in Fortress UK, grimly fighting of intruders, clinging to ill-gotten gains, defending historic hierarchies.

Campaigns for a Universal Basic Income, for a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay, for restoring and rewilding our countryside, for a just transition to a climate-safe society are doing this work.

Where its frighteningly rare is in the mainstream of our politics on the nightly news, in the parliamentary chambers, even on the social media channels.

We have to get the balance of our politics right, between offence and defence. But above all we have to be clear about what is happening.

Centrism, leaving things much as they are, is no longer practically possible, given our climate emergency and nature crisis, the levels of poverty, inequality and insecurity that the current economic structures deliver. That entirely evident to the public.

They want a clear message of change, and strong emotions to match up to the evident urgency.

Hope is the opposite of fear, plenty the opposite of scarcity, care the opposite of hate.

We have to spread the understanding that there are more than sufficient resources for everyone on this planet to have a decent life while we protect the climate and restore the natural world means a hopeful, plenteous, caring world.

We need a stronghold, a castle of hope, a place of care where people will naturally flock, within strong walls built from respect for the rights and dignity of all. Thats a crucial step in pushing the Far Right threat back out into the fringe badlands.

As youre here, we have something to ask you. What we do here to deliver real news is more important than ever. But theres a problem: we need readers like you to chip in to help us survive. We deliver progressive, independent media, that challenges the rights hateful rhetoric. Together we can find the stories that get lost.

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Using nuclear weapons to fight the Culture War: that's Far Right government - Left Foot Forward

Liberals exhibit a rather poor understanding of the people who want to destroy them. For example, in a March 30 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette column titled, Asa and the Culture Wars, John Brummett lamented the state legislature wasting its time on matters addressing no legitimate public-policy need, but merely allowing pseudo-religious Christian nationalists to make themselves feel powerful by abusing their offices to pick on people they dont like or approve of or with whom they disagree. Such framing imagines that religions exist separately from people, that there is some idealized faith that can be betrayed by petty political posturing, whereas belief has always been manifest in peoples behavior, even in those acts that appear tremendously hypocritical. This sort of framing, too, runs the risk of painting legislative excesses as something novel, ignoring the much larger and longer history of cultural war conservatism in America.

Part of that tradition comes under the microscope in The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State, the excellent new book by University of Central Arkansas historian Kenneth C. Barnes. The title is a deliberate shot across the bow, for popular culture has trained us to think of the Klan as first and foremost a racist group, rather than a religious one. But centering racism does not help to explain why the KKK was so popular in places like Paragould, Harrison, and Bentonville places that were almost exclusively white. What Barnes does, instead, is to show how the Klan operated at the nexus of religion, race, business, leisure, law and politics. The Protestant white nationalist spirit represented by the Klan permeated all parts of life in Arkansas and beyond.

The broader history of the rise and fall of the Klan in America has already been expertly covered by the likes of Nancy MacLean, Rory McVeigh and Linda Gordon, and Barnes touches only lightly upon the national scene, instead exploring more fully the Arkansas experience, starting with an outline of the career of state KKK leader James Comer. Comer was a businessman, lawyer and devoted member of Little Rocks First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He was also active in local Republican Party circles, which put him at political odds with the majority of Southern Klansmen, although the national Klan courted people across political lines, especially in the West where the Republican Party was much more influential. Under Comers leadership, Arkansas became, by November 1923, one of five states the New York Times designated as controlled by the Klan, and Comer himself became a national figure in Klan circles. Little Rock was even selected as the national headquarters of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan auxiliary group.

The Klan counted very few working-class people among its numbers, instead recruiting local office holders, businessmen, farmers and various professionals. As Barnes writes, It provided white Protestants of some standing with a social life, entertainment, and a race of civic activities. In many ways, the Klan was not so different from the myriad of other fraternal and community organizations of the time. Many preachers became prolific evangelists for the Klan, like Rev. Ben Bogard, a Missionary Baptist minister of Little Rock, and Rev. John H. Moore of First Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, who also authored the textbook A School History of Arkansas, adopted by the State Textbook Commission in 1925 (a book that asserted negroes have every reason to be thankful that their ancestors were brought to this country as slaves). Klan meetings mimicked religious services, complete with the singing of hymns, and klaverns (the local Klan groups) regularly conducted Sunday visits to Protestant churches, where they would praise ministers and offer gifts of money. The Klan also took a moral stance that aligned it with these churches, including the Prohibition eras fight against liquor. Barnes details how Klansmen worked to stack the juries of suspected moonshiners and even took part in raids against illicit stills, most notably in Garland County. And their moral convictions led to the prosecution of other offenses; as Barnes notes, the Monticello Klan No. 108 proposed a secret committee to ascertain the names of young people who ride around in automobiles late at night. Just as conservatives do today, the Klan pitched much of its moral crusaderism as necessary to protect pure and virtuous (read as: white) women from degradation.

Barnes devotes a whole chapter to the political involvement of the Klan, including the use of the technique of the preferential primary to determine which Klansmen they would unite behind in the [Democratic] primary election. Many big names in Arkansas politics were, at one time, members of the Klan, including Gov. Tom Terral, Lt. Gov. Lee Cazort, Congressman John N. Tillman, Gov. Homer Adkins, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Lee Seamster, and Congressman William Frank Norrell. However, the Klans dominance in state politics provoked its own backlash, with people like John Martineau pitching themselves as anti-Klan candidates. And just like the churches it emulated, the Klan ended up splitting into multiple factions, largely based on accusations many of them accurate ones that state leaders were using the organization to line their own pockets, before largely fading away in the coming decade.

Yes, the Klan was a racist organization, and yes, its members most certainly participated in some of the most noteworthy cases of group violence in 1920s Arkansas: the riots that swept through the southern oilfields, the brutal breaking of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad strike and the lynching of John Carter in Little Rock. But more than anything, the Klan was a mainstream American organization, and as Barnes notes, its concept of One Hundred Percent Americanism became the foundation for the modern conservative movement in American politics. The Klans brand of Christian nationalism was not mere pseudo-religious posturing, but provided a moral vision for the future, one to be enforced by violence if necessary, and we can see the continued power of that vision in everything from state laws to limit gender nonconformity to the attempted coup dtat of Jan. 6, 2021, when Christian nationalists, and their allies in government, tried to take over the country, just like the Klan took over the state nearly a century ago.

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The Klan and the Kulture Wars: A review of Kenneth C. Barnes' new book on white nationalism in 1920s Arkansas - Arkansas Times