The Angle

The Angle: Phantasmagorical Pseudo-Scandals Edition

Slate’s daily newsletter on Mississippi’s sweepingly anti-gay bill, why Susan Rice was right, and what Hitler and Putin have in common.

Then–National Security Adviser Susan Rice and President Barack Obama embrace after the State of the Union speech in January 2016.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

White fight: What can one town’s fight with the KKK tell us about the larger war over white nationalism? In his meticulously reported piece, Bret Schulte went to Harrison, Arkansas—a 96 percent white town of only 13,000 people—to investigate the state of “the most racist town in America.” What he found was a microcosm of Trump’s America—the normalization of white supremacy and the dedicated, struggling citywide effort to stop it.

Bigotry, legalized: At the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week, Mississippi began defending its sweepingly anti-LGBTQ bill HB 1523—the most bigoted legislation of its kind since same-sex marriage was recognized by the Supreme Court in 2015. The bill is already causing ripples within the conservative judicial community, Mark Joseph Stern reports from Texas, and is setting up a battle between those advocating for religious freedom and those vying to legalize bigotry.

From Hitler to Putin: In this foreboding supplement to the Fascism Slate Academy, Timothy Snyder scrupulously compares the tactics of Adolf Hitler to those of Vladimir Putin. Both men, according to Snyder, are “terror managers” who used incidents of terrorism to strip away democratic rights—precisely what we should be leery of here and now. (The article is an excerpt from Timothy Snyder’s new book On Tyranny.)

Public service: With the new report detailing former National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s attempts to identify Trump campaign associates intercepted in routine surveillance operations, the president is once again fanning the flames of conspiracy. But Michelle Goldberg, for one, doesn’t see Rice’s reported behavior as such a bad thing—on the contrary, she argues that it would have been “a dereliction of duty” for the Obama administration to ignore the brewing Trump-Russia scandal.

For fun: OK, so these are the tweets that prove Donald Trump is right about wiretapping!