In early September 2021, at the top of the magazine’s annual list of 400 billionaires Forbes, were the “Usual suspects” : Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Bill Gates (Microsoft) … And then, from eleventh place, the “usual strangers”: Jim Walton, Alice Walton and Rob Walton, in their seventies all three with a fortune of 68 billion dollars (60 billion euros). Going down the rankings, we find three more Waltons – Lukas, Nancy, Chrysty – for a total of $ 34 billion. The addition is quickly made: in September 2021, the Walton family was the richest in the United States, with a fortune of $ 238 billion, ahead of Jeff Bezos (200 billion).

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers When Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and George Soros don’t pay income tax

Strangers in Europe, who are not across the Atlantic. Walton like… Walmart: Jim, Alice and Rob are the children of Sam Walton (1918-1992), the founder of Walmart supermarkets, created in 1962, in the depths of Arkansas, in the small town of Bentonville. From this region of the Ozarks, on the borders of Missouri and Oklahoma, Sam Walton and his successors conquered America and then the planet: with his 2.3 million employees worldwide, 11,000 stores including 4 600 in the United States, Walmart is the largest private employer in the United States and the world.

Resistance against Amazon

Above all, the multinational is organizing resistance against Amazon, with some success, since its figure is still higher than that of the world leader in Internet sales (570 billion dollars in turnover against 470 expected for Amazon in 2021) and that it showed better results than expected. The firm also made the fortune of the Waltons, who still own 40% of this company valued at 400 billion dollars, in particular because their father had sold them his titles when they were of little value, paying a minimum inheritance tax.

The story begins in Bentonville, Arkansas, for which there is a direct flight from New York. On arrival, everything is Walton, everything is Walmart: in the airport lobby, the University of Arkansas advertises the MBA (Master of Business Administration) which bears Walton’s name; on the road to the airport, immediately, three gigantic Walmart warehouses; the boulevard is called Samuel-Walton while the aparthotel bears the name of South Walton Suites. And in the city center, on the pretty sunny square, is the Walmart Museum, to the glory of the founder.

You have 76.47% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

On January 6, 2021, the whole world discovered a shirtless man, horns on his head, posing proudly in the heart of the United States Capitol. Like millions of Internet users addicted to conspiracy theories, the “QAnon Shaman” (Jake Angeli, real name) believes in the prophecy according to which Donald Trump, supported by “Q”, a mysterious entity expressing itself in aphorisms on Internet, fight against a pedosatanist network in the White House. And the fact that, despite the electoral victory, according to them stolen, of Joe Biden, he will stay for a second term.

Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers A year later, back to the day when American democracy faltered

The prophecy did not come true, and on January 20, Mr. Biden’s inauguration day, Mr. Trump did leave the Oval Office, and Mr. Angeli, who has since disowned the movement and the former president, was sentenced to forty-one months in prison. With him, many QAnons (nickname of his followers, contraction of “Q” and “anonymous”) turned on their heels, disappointed. Like the repentant conspirator Jitarth Jadeja, who in a surreal television moment apologized to a CNN host for believing he was eating babies. But others remained, more firmly convinced than ever of the existence of these plots.

How many are there today to adhere to this body of mystical, Trumpist and millenarian beliefs, born in 2017 and spread on conspiratorial forums of the extreme right, like 8chan or 8kun? It is impossible to quantify the extent of the phenomenon. Especially since, if some have shed their faith in “Q” and Donald Trump, they can remain permeable to fanciful stories.

A marginalized movement, but which has been emulated

According to several polls, between 3% and 7% of Americans identified in 2020 as members of the QAnon movement. Since the snub of January 6, 2021, the big platforms, Facebook in the lead, have cleaned up, deleting pages and profiles close to this community by the thousands, pushing it towards more marginal networks, such as Odysee, VK or Telegram.

Less visible because less centralized, his militant heart continues to reread the news under his delusional conspiratorial prism. A year after his “puppet” enthronement, Mr. Biden is said to be held captive in White House jails, replaced in public by an actor, while real power is secretly in the hands of the military and Mr. Trump. . As for the other leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, they would have been executed in 2018, replaced by look-alikes.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers “If nothing happens, we will pass for idiots”: how a conspiratorial channel QAnon experienced the inauguration of Joe Biden

This absurd story seems very marginal today, but in a diffuse way QAnon’s conspiratorial thinking software has deeply irradiated American society. At the end of spring 2021, a third of Americans continued to believe in the conspiracy theory according to which Mr. Biden would have “stolen” the American election of 2020, and even 15% in the existence of a pedosatanic elite who control society in the shadows. Two central theses in the imagination QAnon.

You have 61.37% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

The Kishinev pogrom, which killed around 40 people in 1903, was not the only one committed in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century.^e century nor the most terrible. This massacre nonetheless occupies a very special place in the imagination of American Jews, a symbol of a “tearful history” for millions of their emigrants, convinced of having found a haven of peace in the United States. This American “exceptionalism” is at the heart of the work of historian Salo Baron. [1895-1989], born in Galicia, on the eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and having emigrated across the Atlantic. He was celebrating a New World which seemed to him immune to the pervasive anti-Semitism on the Old Continent.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers Pierre Birnbaum: “The valley of tears of Jewish history extends to American society”

By weaving this double thread, the historian Pierre Birnbaum draws up a very erudite and fascinating history of American Judaism and anti-Semitism, an area rather neglected until now. In a previous work, The Two Houses (Gallimard, 2012), he compared the history of the citizenship of Jews in France and in the United States, the two nations which first emancipated them, but according to radically different models, statist and secular for one, communitarian for one. the other.

This new book highlights the rise in recent years in the United States of anti-Semitic hatred fueled by the ultra-right. But, as Pierre Birnbaum shows, the history of the Jews in the country was less happy. that it seems. One of its most tragic moments was the lynching in 1915 of Leo Frank, a prominent and Jewish industrialist from Atlanta wrongly accused of the rape and murder of one of his workers. A case which aroused a shock similar to that of the Dreyfus affair in France. But, one hundred and seven years later, Leo Frank has still not been rehabilitated.

Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers “The Jews had different destinies in the United States and in France”

Marc Semo

For a long time, American Jews believed they had escaped the tragedies of Jewish history. The rise of a supremacist right and the increasing frequency of anti-Semitic acts undermine these certainties, as the historian Pierre Birnbaum explains in his book The Tears of History. From Kishinev to Pittsburgh (Gallimard, 208 pages, 18.50 euros).

Is the American dream of the Jews shaken?

The shock of the bombing of a synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, was immense. Killer Robert Gregory Bowers, yelling “Heil Hitler”, killed eleven worshipers and injured many more. The emotion spread across the country, and beyond. Since then, synagogues and Jewish institutions have barricaded themselves, raised protective walls, hired guard services, never before seen in the peaceful history of small Jewish communities, lost in the suburbs, deep in the United States. The memory of the pogroms undergone by the grandparents or the great-grandparents transmitted ceaselessly resurfaces intact. In this imaginary, the Cossacks of the Kishinev pogrom, in Russia [1903], crossed the Atlantic. The fear sets in to such an extent that, for the first time in half a century, nearly 5,000 American Jews left for Israel in 2021.

Read also American Jews in shock after the Pittsburgh bombing

The Dark Predictions of Philip Roth [1933-2018], who imagined in his work The Plot Against America [2004] the establishment of fascism in the United States, seem to become reality. Just before he died, he denounced the quasi-fascism of Donald Trump, whose verbal violence leads straight to the Pittsburgh massacre, and the rise of the anti-Semitic radical rights, which are directly inspired by Nazism.

Did American Judaism believe that it had been preserved from the tragedies of Jewish history?

Salo Baron, the first Jewish professor appointed to Columbia University in 1930, argued that Jewish history is not necessarily synonymous with tears, massacres, pogroms. After the Shoah, however, he comes to recognize that for two thousand years it has indeed been a valley of tears. He then became the champion of American exceptionalism, a decentralized society where the shtetl [village juif d’Europe de l’Est] can revive in a democratic and pluralistic environment.

The Founding Fathers experienced themselves as the new Hebrews who escaped the grip of the English “pharaoh” by crossing the Atlantic to reach the Holy Land and establish, thanks to the Constitution of 1787, complete freedom of conscience and religion, a separation of the State and religions conducive to the development of the latter.

You have 75.6% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

The atmosphere was dismal, without the slightest audience. In the heart of the Capitol, in the Hall of Statues, President Joe Biden and his vice-president Kamala Harris commemorated, Thursday, January 6, the assault on the Capitol, in this place where a year earlier, the crowd of supporters of Donald Trump paraded violently. His name has never been mentioned, but the former President of the United States has been mentioned more than fifteen times. After pretending to ignore Donald Trump for months, Joe Biden put it at the heart of his speech, as it remains an obstacle to national reconciliation and weighs on his mandate.

“The former president of the United States created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 elections, accused Mr. Biden, alone at his desk in the room. He did it because he values ​​power more than principle, because he considers his own best interests to be more important than the interest of his country and America, and because his bruised ego counts more for him than our democracy or our Constitution. He cannot accept having lost. “

Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers A year later, back to the day when American democracy faltered

Joe Biden also attacked supporters of Donald Trump who invaded the premises on January 6, 2020. “It was not a group of tourists. It was an armed insurrection. They did not seek to defend the will of the people, they sought to deny the will of the people ”. “You can’t love your country only when you win, he added. You cannot obey the law only when it is convenient for you. You cannot be a patriot when you support and allow lies ”.

Shortly before, Vice President Kamala Harris had compared the assault on Capitol Hill to the darkest events in the nation, which would occupy “Our common memory” in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“We are living at a turning point in history”

In his solemn speech, Joe Biden also insisted on the historic stake. “Make no mistake: we are living at a turning point in history. Both in the United States and abroad, we are once again engaged in a struggle between democracy and autocracy … From China to Russia and beyond, they bet the days of democracy are numbered. They bet America will become more like them. I do not believe it. We are not a land of kings, dictators or autocrats. We are a nation of laws; order, not chaos; of peace, not of violence ”, warned the president. “Our democracy has held up. We the people have endured. And we, the people, took it away, rejoiced Mr. Biden. I will defend this nation and I will not allow anyone to put a dagger in the throat of democracy. “

You have 49.57% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

A year after the violent assault on Capitol Hill by supporters of former President Donald Trump, the time is warning: the United States can only accept “Political violence becomes the norm”, wants to warn Joe Biden, according to an excerpt from the speech he is to give, Thursday, January 6.

“We have to decide today which nation we are going to be. Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as the norm? Are we going to be a nation that allows partisan officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people? Are we going to be a nation that does not live in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies? “

“We cannot afford to become that kind of nation”, he believes in this passage communicated by the White House, a year after thousands of supporters of Mr. Trump tried to prevent the certification of his election by the US Congress. The Democratic President will speak at 3 p.m. KST in the Statues Hall of the Capitol, along with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers A year after the assault on Capitol Hill, America has not healed its wounds

Donald Trump’s “Special Responsibility”

Mr. Biden has long chosen to treat his predecessor with contempt, for example refusing to name him in public. But this time, the President of the United States is determined to publicly discuss the “Special responsibility” of Donald Trump in this outburst of violence, the White House has already said.

Joe biden “Sees January 6 as the tragic culmination of what four years of Trump’s presidency have done to this country”, said his spokesperson, Jen Psaki, on Wednesday. Does the president want to give a more serious, more political turn to a mandate that gives the impression of getting bogged down? After having focused for months on economic and social policy, the White House sees much of its hopes for reforms go up in smoke because of parliamentary blockage. The new wave of Covid-19, inflation, the memory of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan are all elements that are undermining Mr. Biden’s confidence day after day.

Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers A year later, back to the day when American democracy faltered

Even more worrying: according to a very recent poll, only 55% of Americans polled believe that he was elected regularly. Donald Trump’s speeches therefore seem to have made their way into people’s minds, the American billionaire continuing to claim, without proof, that he is the real winner of the election. The Republican gave up speaking Thursday, no doubt fearing that the press conference he wanted to give from his luxurious Florida residence would be too much provocation.

Conservative Party Leaders Discretion

But the former president did not moderate his verb, however. He again called Tuesday “Crime of the century” the fraud which, according to him, marred the presidential election of 2020. And, in the Republican camp, few are those who dare to criticize aloud Donald Trump. The leaders of the Conservative Party have for the most part chosen to keep a low profile Thursday.

Leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, estimated in February 2021 that the former president was “Morally responsible” of the events of January 6. Thursday, he will be at a funeral in the southern United States, far from the ceremonies in Washington. “Our great nation is now reeling on the edge of an ever deeper precipice. Without immediate action, we are in serious danger of experiencing a civil confrontation ”, meanwhile alarmed former President Jimmy Carter, in a column published by the New York Times.

To this deeply divided nation, Joe Biden wants to propose a way forward to strengthen democracy. The president is trying in particular to revive legislation on minority access to the right to vote. He will travel for this purpose on Tuesday to the state of Georgia, emblematic of past and present battles for civil rights.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers Republicans remain divisive after Donald Trump leaves

But Joe Biden faces conservative states that multiply legislation making it harder for African Americans to vote at the polls, a Supreme Court bearing the conservative mark of his predecessor, and a Congress Democrats control only a hair’s breadth of the thumb. , and that they could lose completely in the legislative elections in the fall. The president’s leeway to save the” soul “ America, as he promised during his campaign, seems very limited.

The World with AFP

Mired in a stubborn controversy and in the grip of boycott of the entertainment industry, the organizers of the Golden Globes have decided to keep their awards ceremony scheduled for Sunday, January 9, but it will not have an audience or television broadcast.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which is the jury for these awards, has been the target for months of accusations of racism, sexism, harassment and corruption. The Golden Globes gala evening traditionally opened the film awards season and was catered for by the Hollywood darlings. But this year, the stars are absent subscribers and the NBC television channel has given up broadcasting the ceremony.

Read also Golden Globes change rules to respond to criticism of lack of representativeness

This will not prevent the HFPA from proceeding as if nothing had happened with the presentation of its awards, Sunday in the usual Beverly Hills Hotel, to highlight “Philanthropic works” from the Association. “Over the past twenty-five years, the HFPA has donated over $ 50 million” to various charities, remind the organizers in a press release. No audience is planned for this 79^e edition of the Golden Globes, adds the association, citing the health situation and the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. Belfast, by Kenneth Branagh, and The Power of the Dog, by Jane Campion, are at the top of the nominations this year.

Tom Cruise returned his trophies

The future of Golden Globes appears uncertain. More than 100 publicists wrote to the HFPA in March asking them to end the “Discriminatory and unprofessional behavior, ethical breaches and accusations of corruption”.

Read also Too opaque, unrepresentative: in Hollywood, the Golden Globes are trying to reform

Amid the scandal, the organization quickly announced a series of reforms, including an unprecedented recruitment of new members to improve the representation of minorities within it. But critics, like those of stars Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo, have publicly denounced the reforms deemed insufficient, while Tom Cruise returned the organization to its three Golden Globes in protest.

Major studios, such as Warner Bros, Netflix and Amazon, have immediately indicated that they will no longer work with the HFPA until significant changes are implemented.

The World with AFP

“Ocean ferryman”, such was the profession that Thomas Bishop had chosen for himself, says Tom, professor of literature at New York University, who like no other has brought literary exchanges between the two shores of the Atlantic to life. In a New York that has become the great cultural metropolis of the world, he has set up Saint-Germain-des-Prés there. Tom Bishop died at his home in New York on January 2 at the age of 92. He was one of the last great figures of a generation of American intellectuals who reshaped the transatlantic world after the war, such as Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, of the New York Review of Books, historian Tony Judt and essayist Susan Sontag.

Tom Bishop was born in 1929, in a Jewish family of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Nine years later, at the time of the Anschluss, his family fled, first to Hungary, then to Paris. He learns French in three months, it was for him “A new birth”, as he confided to the philologist Donatien Grau, in an interview book, Literature is a journey of discovery (Diaphanes, 2021). Then, faced with the collapse of France, a hasty departure for New York was organized in the spring of 1940. He later discovered that the literary critic George Steiner had made the trip on the same boat.

A new way of approaching knowledge

In America he keeps talking French, forges a new identity there against the German of his childhood. Student, he deepened his taste for French literature at New York University, before completing with a doctorate at Berkeley on Luigi Pirandello, a rare Italian infidelity. Tom Bishop then joined New York University (NYU), which he never left. At the age of 30, he took over the management of the French House, created in 1957. Throughout his career, he remained attached to this institution and participated in making it one of the most brilliant centers of French culture in the United States. United.

Tom Bishop is imbued with the quest for modernity of the literary avant-garde and, in the years 1950-1960, is particularly interested in the New Roman. He befriends Alain Robbe-Grillet, and invites him for twenty years to teach at his university. He is also close to Nathalie Sarraute, but also to the great figures of the theater of the absurd, Eugène Ionesco and, in particular, Samuel Beckett. Encounters are at the heart of his practice as a researcher and he cultivates a thousand friendships to better feel the evolutions of the intellectual world.

You have 54.78% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.

Editorial of the “World”. The assault on the United States Congress on January 6, 2021, cast a dark veil over democracy in this great country. That an outgoing president beaten regularly at the polls do everything to prevent the peaceful transfer of power had definitely cast a disgrace on Donald Trump’s mandate. What has happened since, while less spectacular, is nevertheless equally alarming. To the point of raising questions about the solidity of United States institutions.

Because the shock that this attack against the general will expressed by the vote should have triggered did not happen. It is true that a large majority of the Republican elected representatives of the House of Representatives had voted against the officialization of the victory of Joe Biden without the slightest legal justification, at night, while the corridors of the Capitol in Washington were still resounding with uproar. .

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers A year after the assault on Capitol Hill, back to the day when American democracy faltered

A low noise form of civil war has taken root in the United States. Adherence to the thesis of an alleged election “Stolen” has become the new right-thinking of American conservatives. It is now a proof of loyalty, not to a country, or even to a party, but to the man with whom the Grand Old Party persists in identifying.

Rare alternative voices

A year after January 6, 2021, nearly two in three Republicans continue to question the legitimacy of the Democratic president, according to a poll by Washington post. This doxa is relayed and maintained by the conservative media ecosystem, which is emptying of its rare alternative voices, as the departure of Fox News of the respected Chris Wallace has shown, at the same rate as the Republican Party is purging itself of its dissidents. .

Read also Assault on Capitol Hill: Trump asks Supreme Court to block transfer of documents to commission

Under pressure from the former president, elected officials from his party first opposed his symbolic dismissal. Then they prevented an independent commission of inquiry from being set up, and finally multiplied in the decisive states the attacks against the vote and its certification by non-partisan bodies. This undermining work was methodical. To the point that one can wonder what would happen today in the event of a particularly tight presidential election.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers Donald Trump acquitted without glory after his second impeachment trial

Much to the misfortune of American democracy, no improvement can be seen for institutions that cannot be reformed in the absence of a minimum consensus. The electoral culling which minimizes the number of contested constituencies means that the elections to the House are settled during primaries which favor the most extreme votes. The mode of election of the Senate, as of the presidency, grants an unequal premium to the rural States where the republicans are dominant.

The judiciary has also been overtaken by this deleterious polarization. When the Democrats suppressed the qualified majority in the Senate for the confirmation of federal judges, in response to the systematic obstruction of the Republicans, the latter replied, once again in the majority, by removing the same qualified majority for appointments to the Supreme Court . This decision allowed Donald Trump to appoint three very conservative judges, accentuating the gap between the highest judicial body in the country and the society on which his judgments weigh.

The sum of these sags is considerable. Repairing this damaged democracy involves a national awareness and a sense of the general interest, but both are currently lacking. Unfortunately for a country that has long considered itself a model.

Read also Article reserved for our subscribers “2021 has been a good year for dictators and a bad year for democracies”

The world