News with Nuance: March 22, 2024

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hi Readers,

It has been two weeks since our last News post, and I honestly kind of feel like I’ve been gulping headlines from a fire hose this entire time. You too?

This time of March is always busy, with basketball tournament playoffs and Lent in the Church and budget time for local schools, but this year we’re also contending with a presidential election year in which Christian Nationalism and a slide into American authoritarianism is definitely on the ballot. I wrote the last News post just hours before Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), gave a State of the Union response dripping with #tradwife vibes and white Christian Nationalist rhetoric. I covered my reaction to that speech on social media in real time, and you’ll see some of that in our CN section below - but I also have a lengthier piece coming out next Tuesday (3/26) addressing in particular the aesthetics of Britt’s speech, and why it’s important to know her intended audience (I’m pretty sure I was part of it, and maybe you were, too). So be on the lookout for that next Tuesday.

As for today, I’ve got lots of stories for you - but I promise to keep the through-line I’ve always strived for in News with Nuance. These stories are going to lean heavily on showing the humanity behind big national storylines, to understand the context and the detail behind the headlines, and as you can see in the stories below, there are so many excellent journalists and writers out there working hard to share these stories with the world.

Each time I compile these News posts, I’m reminded that even though much of the work I do is done alone at my computer, I’m not doing that work by myself. There are many who want to share and hear and grow from telling one another’s stories. That’s worth fighting for.

Let’s get to the news - with nuance …

Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall, best friends and rare Democrats in conservative Enid, confronted Blevins about his white nationalist ties

Photo by Michael Noble, Jr., NBC News

The Headline: A small city in Oklahoma elected a white nationalist. Will it be able to vote him out?

Most national news outlets have done the whole (regrettable) “let’s humanize the Neo-Nazis” story by this point. This isn’t that. Instead, NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny focuses the story on the ordinary people in this small city of Enid, Okla., who (unknowingly) voted in a white nationalist to their towns six-seat City Council.

Zadrozny’s choice here to focus on the townspeople rather than the Neo-Nazi himself is an all-too rare choice, and it’s really important. By doing so, she helps people to see themselves as part of the story - she centers a lot of ordinary rural Midwesterners who are standing up for long-held values of decency, honesty, and morality. Zadrozny doesn’t hide the problems in the town, and she doesn’t make excuses for Blevins’ election. But she does paint a broad picture of what’s happening in red states and counties all across America, where the Republican Party is being taken over by outside authoritarian and sometimes-fascist and racist groups. Instead of Blevins, the white nationalist, Zadrozny makes local residents and grandmothers Connie Vickers and Nancy Presnall the main characters of this story. More of this please from the national media coverage of Trumpism and its attendant white nationalist features (not bugs).

Don’t miss, too, the role of local newspaper, the Enid News Eagle in this story.

And what happens when racial reconciliation comes before repentance and justice.

(I was disappointed to see Pastor Wade Burleson, who endorsed my first book, Red State Christians, making excuses for Blevins and supporting him in Zadrozny’s story. Unfortunately Burleson seemed to descend deep into Trumpism during COVID. It never gets any easier watching formerly thoughtful Christian leaders become purveyors of conspiracy theories, Christian Nationalism, and hatred).

The Quote:

Connie Vickers had found the photo online along with others showing Blevins marching alongside an angry mob — a crowd of men recorded throughout the night spitting and shouting “Jews will not replace us!” Vickers had it enlarged at a local print and copy shop. On a January night in 2023, she and Nancy Presnall, best friends, retirees and rare Democrats in a deeply red Oklahoma county, brought it to a sparsely attended forum where Blevins, a candidate running to represent Ward 1 on Enid’s six-seat City Council, was making his case.

They had hoped to get a question in while Blevins was on stage, but settled for confronting him after.

Hearts pumping, Presnall and Vickers approached the 41-year-old former Marine. From a kitchen trash bag, Vickers pulled out the blown-up photo of Blevins and asked about his ties to white nationalists. 

As his campaign manager whisked a red-faced Blevins away, Vickers and Presnall followed, yelling, “Answer the question, Judd!” 

“He ran away from two little old ladies,” Presnall recalled. 

Story by Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News

The Headline: Jurors found a teen school shooter’s father and mother guilty of manslaughter. Here’s what the verdicts mean for parents

I was reading back over the Substack articles I wrote around this time last year, to try and prepare for more Lent and Holy Week coverage. As I did so, I was reminded that April 2023 was a deadly and devastating month for gun violence in America. I think the mistake we often make as reporters and writers and people in general desperately trying to make sense of these tragedies is to focus on the individual who is pulling the trigger. We hone in on individual stories, instead of finding our way toward shared responsibility and culpability.

Even though it’s terribly sad and tragic, I think this story marks a step toward more shared culpability and responsibility for gun violence in America. In this case, school shooter Ethan Crumbley’s parents, Jennifer and James, were found guilty on various charges in relation to their son’s violent act. Most of these charges were related to Jennifer and James’ unwillingness and/or inability to take seriously their son’s troubled mental state, and to act to remove his access to deadly weapons, or take him home from school. Again, this is a troubling and heartbreaking case. But I believe it’s a necessary step and will hopefully save lives in the future, when all caregivers can take more necessary steps to secure firearms and attend to their loved ones’ mental health, as difficult and painful a process as that is. Of course to that latter point, the social safety net in general cannot rest only on caregivers, but on all of us, and also on legislative policies that prioritize self-care and love for one another.

The Quote: “We’re living in a new world now, and that new world is a prosecutor saying, ‘If we’re not going to have legislation, if we’re not going to have significant protections, we’re going to take it upon ourselves to use the law in a way that gets accountability to everyone and anyone who could have potentially been involved,’” CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday evening.

Story by Dalia Faheid and Eric Levenson, CNN

Because both of these stories represent domestic American stories, here’s one more global story for your reading this week, from Russia, where Navalny’s courage lives on:

Alexei Navalny's final plan to cause Vladimir Putin 'maximum damage'

In my ongoing work to lift up stories that bring depth to places that are often flattened in their coverage by national media, here are some stories from the American Midwest, an oft-stereotyped and/or misunderstood region, where I’ve lived most of my life:

The Suicide Epidemic in Rural Minnesota: How we got here and how we move forward

'White Rural Rage' Cites My Research. It Gets Everything About Rural America Wrong | Opinion

Working-class people rarely have a seat ‘at the legislative table’ in state capitols

VP Harris promotes abortion access in historic visit to Minnesota Planned Parenthood

They were injured at the Super Bowl parade. A month later, they feel forgotten

This Week in Christian Nationalism and Religious Extremism

While this newsletter won’t focus overall on Christian Nationalism, each Friday I will include a brief update from that week, as it’s both a continuing focus of my work and also, I think, a critical threat to both American democracy and the faithful witness of Jesus’ Gospel, which exists independently of the United States!

In one sentence: Christian Nationalism is a version of the idolatrous Theology of Glory, which replaces the genuine worship of God with worship of a particular vision of America, often rooted in a revisionist history of white people in the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement or the women’s movement. Christian Nationalism supports a violent takeover of government and the imposition of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on all people. Christian nationalism relies on a theological