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Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?

Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.

“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.

Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.

In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,

Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,

Unburdened by illusion that Donald Trump can or will “turn this thing around,” they have proceeded straightaway to the next important conversation: What comes next for America’s battered Republican Party? Noah Rothman writes: “Reunification and a recapitulation of something resembling a national governing coalition must be the foremost priority.”

reconstitute conservatism as it used to be, refined by the famous “autopsy” of 2013.

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.

Trump knows “more about courts than any human being.” He knows “more about steelworkers than anybody.” He knows “more about ISIS than the generals do,” and “more about offense and defense than they will ever understand.” He knows “more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived.” He even knows more about medicine than his doctor, dictating a doctor’s letter predicting he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Just before leading the rally in the pledge, Trump once again opened the door to ordering the torture of captured suspected terrorists, just one day after vowing that he would not order military officials to violate U.S. or international laws.

"We're going to stay within the laws. But you know what we're going to do? We're going to have those laws broadened because we're playing with two sets of rules: their rules and our rules," Trump said pointing to ISIS's tactics, which have included torture and brutal executions.

The comments mark a stark contrast to a statement Trump issued just a day earlier. After vigorously defending the use of waterboarding and suggesting that the U.S. should "go a lot further than waterboarding," Trump vowed Friday in a statement that he would "not order our military or other officials to violate those laws."

The first story about the typical Trump buyer was simple: These were poorly informed voters, swept up by a modern circus act orchestrated by a mass-media-age P. T. Barnum with arguably worse hair. But Trump’s appeal has proven to be more than a passing fad.

Back in December, a Washington Post analysis found that Trump's support skewed male, white, and poor.

The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.

stock would crumble like a paper bag."

"big tax shelter" for Amazon since the paper is "losing a fortune."

Amazon is a "no profit" company.

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump.

under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is.

Over the course of just a few days Donald Trump has gone from saying that we might have to close down mosques and create a Muslim registry to saying that not only will we do this but we have to do it and anything less is an utter capitulation.

In other words, rapidly evolving from refusing to rule out a draconian policy to affirmatively endorsing it to being its leading advocate.

With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.

Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.

The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.

it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses

Donald Trump’s run for the presidency is premised on one fact above all: He’s a fabulously successful businessman. And yet, paradoxically, running for president may be the most disastrous business decision he’s made—or, at the very least, his worst in a while.

It’s unclear what the value of Trump’s NBC, Macy’s, and Serta deals were, but it’s a safe bet that altogether they’re a bigger deal to Trump than they are to any one of those corporations

How did Trump get from $250 million, the upper end of O’Brien’s range, in 2005 to $9 billion today? It’s been 10 years, and an already-wealthy person can make a lot of money in 10 years, but that decade also included a massive economic slump, a crisis in real estate (putatively Trump’s core business), and a 2009 declaration of Chapter 11 bankruptcy by his casino group. One way to get to the $9 billion figure is that, as Jordan Weissmann highlighted, Trump estimates that the value of his name alone is worth more than a third of tha

Over the past few months, we’ve seen Donald Trump lower, again and again, the bar for political discourse. All the while, though, he’s been lowering the scientific bar, too. In May, for instance, while speaking to an audience of West Virginia coal miners, Trump complained that regulations designed to protect the ozone layer had compromised the quality of his hair spray. Those regulations, he continued, were misguided, because hair spray is used mainly indoors, and so can have no effect on the atmosphere outside. No wonder Hillary Clinton felt the need to include, in her nomination speech, the phrase “I believe in science.”

The positions taken by Trump and the Republicans have consequences beyond science itself. Essentially, they are betting that, for a significant portion of the country, empirical reality doesn’t matter; they are also signalling that empirical reasoning won’t be the basis of their public policy. Today, of course, we face global challenges such as climate change, which are more urgent than any we have ever confronted. These challenges require a sober assessment of reality. When science is distorted on the campaign trail, it may produce applause lines. But if those distortions lead to bad public policy, the quality of people’s lives will suffer.

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.

Sean Hannity used his Fox News show on Monday night to feed wild conspiracy theories that the protests erupting around the country weren’t a spontaneous display of anger against President Donald Trump. Instead, he implied they were “bankrolled” by shadowy figures.

Is a raised, emphatic voice heard as something more grating when it emanates from a woman? Is toughness perceived as something more pernicious when the hide and stride are female?

But for an even more obvious, indisputable example of unequal treatment, look to Trump. A woman with his personal life, public comportment and potty mouth wouldn’t last a nanosecond in a political campaign — or, for that matter, in a boardroom. Her name on a line of scarves wouldn’t be the selling point that his on a line of ties is.

The moral judgments — in particular the sexual ones — that we make about men and women are utterly and unjustly dissimilar.