In“A Classicist’s Guide to Misappropriated History," Donna Zuckerberg explores how the Alt Right and Alt Lite have co-opted classical studies to serve as the idealization of “an imagined golden age of White supremacist patriarchy they can aspire to recreate.” In“The New Southern Strategy,” Cole Parke makes the case that the conservative cause of “religious freedom,” dominated by claims of “Christian persecution,” has become the new code by which Republicans can appeal to White voters’ racial anxieties. “The Road to Flint” by Anna Clark explores how Flint’s devastating and prolonged water crisis began with Michigan’s appointment of emergency managers. What happened to Flint, Clark writes, arose from the same right-wing belief “that ailing cities just need a better and more authoritarian leader to get things working again—a presumption that has proved its limits again and again.” In “Kochs in Pro-Immigrant Clothing,” Gabriel Arana investigates how the LIBRE Initiative and LIBRE Institute are continuing their efforts to draw Latinxs into the Republican Party, despite its feverish hostility to immigrants and refugees. Lastly, in “Bringing Bad Sex Ed Back,” Melissa Mayer reports on how the Trump administration is reviving the failed, faith-based abstinence-only policies of the Bush era, now rebranded with the language of scientific legitimacy, as “Sexual Risk Avoidance.”
