In the first season of The X-Files, Dana Scully accompanies her former FBI Academy teacher, Jack Willis, to an attempted bank robbery. One of the robbers shoots Willis and Scully shoots the robber, who dies. After a near-death experience in the hospital, Willis wakes up, but he has changed. He’s dark, evil. His body has been possessed by the bank robber, who will try to reunite with his lover and seek revenge on whoever tipped off the FBI.

If we believe that deep down, we’re morally good, does it push us to act accordingly? In a paper published in this month, Matt Stichter, a moral philosopher at Washington State University, brought up some potential ethical downsides of people walking around with the belief that they have a morally good true self.

“Initially my reaction was, ‘Oh wow, this is great. People inherently care about morality as core to their identity,’” Stitcher said ”But the more I started to think about it, the more it started to worry me.”

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Vice

Constitutional changes following the American Civil War could be used to bar President Donald Trump from seeking future office, historian Eric Foner said in a virtual lecture hosted by Washington State University on Tuesday.

“Key questions facing American society right now are Reconstruction questions,” said Foner, the first to give a series of lectures about the state of American democracy as part of a distinguished speaker series hosted by the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at WSU that will continue into next month.

The historical insight provided by Foner, who has published several books on 19th century American politics including 2010’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” is the goal of the speaker series, said Cornell Clayton, director of the Foley Institute.

“It’s a really opportune time to take a step back and look at what’s happening more broadly, whether or not we’re at a turning point,” Clayton said.

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The Spokesman-Review

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler thrust herself into the national spotlight on Friday when the Washington Republican came out with a stunning account of Donald Trump’s actions on the day of the Capitol insurrection. In a statement put out on the eve of the vote in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, Herrera Beutler said that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her that in a conversation with the then-president on Jan. 6, Trump appeared to side with the mob, telling him the rioters were “more upset about the election than you are.”

“I could see a primary in 2022 where Republicans put forward a very clear Trump candidate. Her weakness will be on the right,” said Mark Stephan, an associate professor of political science at Washington State University. “But I think there will be Democrats who will vote for her because they felt she acted courageously in this case.”

Stephan of Washington State University said Herrera Beutler is likely making up for any lost conservative voters by picking up more centrists. He said he expected that the ramifications of her stance on impeachment will likely take shape in the year ahead.

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NPR

The beliefs that prompted hundreds of people to violently break into the U.S. Capitol earlier this month are not the kind that can be easily explained away.

Conspiracy theories exist across the political spectrum, said Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University. But Republicans, he argued, have ignored the calls from some within the party – including, famously, the conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s – to reject conspiratorial factions.

“This has been going on, on both the left and the right, but it’s been asymmetrical,” Clayton said.

Experts say rooting it out once it’s taken hold is a difficult, if not impossible, task. Clayton pointed to the current movement by social media outlets to remove accounts that peddle in conspiracy theories as a good first step.

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The Spokesman Review