8 AUGUST

Special election goes down to the wire

The final special election before the US midterms is currently too close to call, with Republican Troy Balderston just over 1700 votes ahead of Democrat Danny O'Connor in Ohio's 12th Congressional District. The Republican Party machinery converged on this suburban district for a furious eleventh-hour campaign aimed at saving a conservative House seat and averting a special election disaster.

President Donald Trump visited central Ohio at the weekend in hopes of boosting the Republican candidate. Trump won the 12th district by 11 percentage points in 2016 and it hasn't elected a Democrat to Congress since at least the early 1980s. A loss in Ohio, following shock Republican defeats in Pennsylvania and Alabama, would have further fed fears about a 'blue wave' in November's midterms. The narrow lead in such a previously safe conservative seat will do little to calm those fears.

An unknown number of provisional ballots are yet to be counted and Ohio law provides for an automatic recount if the two candidates are ultimately separated by less than half a percentage point. But whomever loses this week will get a rematch in the regularly scheduled election in just three months.

NEWS WRAP

Charlottesville one year on

• August 11 and 12 marks one year since a white nationalist rally led to violent clashes in the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where one woman was killed when an Ohio man drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. The events led to one of the first cross-party condemnations of President Trump after he failed to address the violence for a number of days, before eventually blaming both sides for the clashes. Honorary associate Nicole Hemmer released a six-episode podcast this week exploring the events in Charlottesville and the history behind it. It includes the voices of more than 20 activists, witnesses, scholars, and city leaders. LISTEN HERE.
   

• President Trump will host a dinner for business leaders on Tuesday night (US time) that will include five CEOs of major US companies who all publicly dissolved their ties to the White House during the Charlottesville controversy last year. The purpose of the dinner at Trump's private golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey is to create "an opportunity for the president to hear how the economy is doing from [the CEOs'] perspective and what their priorities and thoughts are for the year ahead," the White House said in a statement. READ MORE HERE.
   

• The trade spat between the United States and China continued Tuesday with the US Treasury announcing 25 per cent tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese goods. The tariffs will hit multiple industries and target around 280 electronic, plastic, and chemical products, as well as motorcycles and railway cars. They go into effect on August 23. Director of the Centre's Trade and Investment program, Stephen Kirchner, spoke to Bloomberg on Monday about the latest in the tit-for-tat tariff war. WATCH HERE.
   
• Domestic politics and protectionism still meddle with Australia's approach to foreign investments, but there's plenty it can learn from US regulation according to Stephen Kirchner and Jared Mondschein. They wrote for Fairfax newspapers this week on foreign investment policy and national security following the release of their new report on the subject. READ MORE HERE.
   
• The United States will reimpose economic sanctions against Iran that were lifted under a 2015 nuclear accord, ratcheting up pressure on Tehran. The sanctions are a consequence of President Trump’s decision in May to withdraw from an international deal that sought to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for easing pressure on the country’s shaky economy. READ MORE HERE.

If you stab someone with a knife and then you say you want talks, then the first thing you have to do is remove the knife.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani
Televised address
6 August 2018

ANALYSIS

The KKK in Hollywood cinema

Rodney Taveira
Lecturer in American Studies

Spike Lee’s latest film BlackKklansman, which won the Grand Prix prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is based on real-life African American police officer Ron Stallworth. It dramatises Stallworth’s infiltration (with the help of white colleagues) of a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Colorado in 1979.

The film draws a connecting line through America’s history of white supremacy to the current US administration. Lee incorporates footage of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer after a car rammed into counter-protesters. (The driver has been charged with hate crimes; the trial is set to take place in November.)

The footage includes David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, saying that President Trump represents a turning point at which “we” will “take the country back”. Duke is a major secondary character in BlackKklansman – portrayed by Topher Grace of That ’70s Show fame in some canny casting. 

Lee’s method has always been blunt. This bluntness would seem necessary in a time when dissent from any position is so readily dismissed as ‘kookery’, 'fake news', agenda-driven propaganda, or any one of the -isms and -phobias you can accuse the other side of practising. Lee makes it even clearer when he states: “This guy in the White House has given the green light to the Klan.” 

One itch that Lee has continued to scratch across his career has been the appearance of the KKK in entertainment. The regalia, the burning crosses, the lynchings, the racism, the “protection” of white woman’s virtue – all have provided a set of readymade images, themes, and stories that have proven a spectacular feature of American cinema. Lee and many film historians would argue that the KKK – and the white supremacy they so vividly represent – are central to American cinema.

You can read Rodney Taveira's full analysis of representations of the KKK in Hollywood cinema on our website.

DIARY

The week ahead

• 2-12 August: President Trump expected to remain at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
   

• Thursday, 9 August: President Trump is scheduled to host a roundtable with state leaders in Bedminster to discuss prison reform.
   

• Monday, 13 August: US Senate returns from recess. 
   

• Monday, 13 August: Australian Parliament returns from winter recess.

EVENT

Truth decay: Exploring the diminishing role of facts and analysis

VIDEO

White House press secretary refuses to say the media is not an "enemy of the people"

THE WEEK IN TWEETS

#TrumpTowerMeeting

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University of Sydney NSW 2006

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