Today in 5 Lines
President Trump fired Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart editor who helped fuel Trump's rise. Friends of the ousted White House chief strategist told The Atlantic he’s “going nuclear.” Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer reversed his position on taking down a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, saying he will instead push for its immediate removal. In a letter, the members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities announced their resignation from the advisory group, citing Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. Trump met with his national-security team at Camp David to discuss U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
Today on The Atlantic
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Being Black in Charlottesville: White-supremacist rallies aren’t a new threat for the black residents of Charlottesville, Virginia. The city has a legacy of white supremacy that many in the community experienced firsthand. (Vann R. Newkirk II)
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It Won’t Get Better: People want to believe that Steve Bannon’s exit will end the white nationalist, Islamophobic, and nativist ideas coming from the White House. “Alas,” writes Peter Beinart, “that’s almost certainly not the case.”
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The Women Behind the ‘Alt-Right’: There are plenty of women involved in the alt-right movement, but the presence at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last weekend was overwhelmingly male. The reason for that, reports Caroline Kitchener, comes down to how the group sees gender.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yoni Appelbaum on Charlottesville's Aftermath: After white supremacists and neo-Nazis rallied in Virginia, resulting in the deaths of three Americans, President Trump's equivocating responses shocked Republicans and Democrats alike. Did this represent a major breakpoint in American politics? Why have Confederate symbols and ideas suddenly returned to the public sphere, not to mention HBO? And how should Americans comprehend the relationship between these extremist currents and the Trump administration? In a new episode of Radio Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yoni Appelbaum explore these questions with Jeffrey Goldberg, Alex Wagner, and Matt Thompson.