The Independent:

The British far right is becoming more openly racist in the wake of a backlash against international Black Lives Matter protests, experts have warned.

A report by Hope Not Hate, seen exclusively by The Independent before its release, said that years of dominance by Tommy Robinson and other figures focused on Muslims was giving way to rising white nationalism.

The bigotry was always there, but it was toned down for PR purposes.

[The report author] warned that Patriotic Alternative was “trying to give the friendliest possible face to extremely fascist ideas” by using veiled terminology.

But Hope Not Hate’s report found that private online chats between members were “awash with extreme racism, Holocaust denial and open veneration of fascism”.

It said Patriotic Alternative had “antisemitism at its core” and played into conspiracy theories claiming Jews are orchestrating the “replacement” of white Britons.

There are strong parallels with UK anti-trans activism, sections of which are also openly bigoted: scratch a transphobe and you’ll often find an antisemite, a racist and/or a homophobe. It too perpetuates the conspiracy theory that Jews are orchestrating the “replacement” of white Britons, in this case women. 

Patriotic Alternative claims that children are being exposed to pro-LGBT and anti-white “propaganda” and advocates home-schooling using its own package of hateful material on “history and culture”.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell which group of bigots you’re looking at.

The UK now has two world-beating achievements to boast of: the highest excess death rate in Europe and the worst drop in GDP of any G7 nation. We’re in the deepest recession since records began.

As journalist David Osland put it on Twitter:

It’s lucky that asylum seekers, trans people and Dawn Butler are to blame for everything that’s wrong with Britain. Otherwise people might start thinking the government has got something to do with it.

Another blistering piece about Trump’s America, this time in Rolling Stone.

Anthropologist Wade Davis describes “the unravelling of America” and argues that COVID-19 “signals the end of the American era.”

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

…In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

Empires end because they become failed states, unable to cope with external factors – factors such as global pandemics.

Patrick Wyman in Mother Jones:

When the real issues come up, healthy states, the ones capable of handling and minimizing everyday dysfunction, have a great deal more capacity to respond than those happily waltzing toward their end. But by the time the obvious, glaring crisis arrives and the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it’s far too late. The disaster—a major crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn’t so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was.

Davis:

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

…As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

Wyman:

We don’t have to wait decades for all this to sink in. The nature of the problem and its scale are clear now, right now, on the cusp of the disaster. Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point has truly been reached. We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their varied depth and location. Perhaps it’s not yet too late to stanch the bleeding.

Jessica Valenti is very tired of writing the same column over and over again.

I hate that I’m writing this column. Over the years, I’ve published versionafter version of it: how the majority of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence; how misogyny is a clear and obvious indicator of future violence; and how politicians, mainly on the right, refuse to treat it as the epidemic it really is.

And here I am once again. Just this week, Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and well-known misogynist, allegedly killed the son of a federal judge and wounded her husband in an attack at their New Jersey home.

…Women knew he was dangerous, but as happens time and time again, what should have been obvious warning signs were ignored.