Bellevue Presbyterian Church’s senior pastor, Scott Dudley, who has been traveling to Rwanda and working with Rwandans for 20 years, told me that our political rhetoric is getting frighteningly similar to the dehumanizing anti-Tutsi rhetoric that paved the way for the genocide in 1994. Dudley specifically mentioned Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House. When asked about the FBI in the aftermath of the lawful search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Gingrich said, “We’d be better off to think of these people as wolves”—wolves who “want to eat you, wolves who want to dominate.”
Andrew DeCort, a Christian ethicist who has lived in Addis Ababa, told me that what we’re seeing in America brings up memories of what he’d observed in Ethiopia for years before civil war broke out. The United States isn’t on the verge of civil war or genocide, thankfully. “But the lies, the extremism, the raw hunger for power—it can only lead to pain and loss,” he told me.
Jonathan Rauch, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a model of equanimity, told me he “feels shaken” by what he has seen from the Republican Party, especially since January 6, 2021. He described the “gleeful barbarism” and “the embrace of performative cruelty” that characterizes so much of the American right and said that it feels as if MAGA has sealed every exit.
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