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The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.

The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns

The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use

95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue

On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.”

The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.

Dec 12 2015, 8:31 am ET Saudi Arabian Women Vote for First Time in Local Elections

RIYADH — Saudi Arabian women voted for the first time on Saturday in local council elections and also stood as candidates, a step hailed by some activists in the Islamic patriarchy as a historic change, but by others as merely symbolic. "As a first step it is a great achievement. Now we feel we are part of society, that we contribute," said Sara Ahmed, 30, a physiotherapist entering a polling station in north Riyadh. "We talk a lot about it, it's a historic day for us."

This incremental expansion of voting rights has spurred some Saudis to hope the Al Saud ruling family, which appoints the national government, will eventually carry out further reforms to open up the political system.

Saudi Arabian women voted for the first time on Saturday in local council elections and also stood as candidates, a step hailed by some activists in the Islamic patriarchy as a historic change, but by others as merely symbolic.

"As a first step it is a great achievement. Now we feel we are part of society, that we contribute," said Sara Ahmed, 30, a physiotherapist entering a polling station in north Riyadh. "We talk a lot about it, it's a historic day for us."

This incremental expansion of voting rights has spurred some Saudis to hope the Al Saud ruling family, which appoints the national government, will eventually carry out further reforms to open up the political system.

A brawl erupted after Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was dragged from the podium, which led to other members rushing in to join the scuffle.

The prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, had been answering questions at the rostrum and apparently angered a member of Parliament, Oleg Barna, with one response. Mr. Yatsenyuk had deflected a criticism of his cabinet’s energy policy by noting the energy minister is a member of Mr. Barna’s party.

Mr. Barna handed the bouquet to the perplexed Mr. Yatsenyuk, then set upon him, apparently trying to lift and carry off the prime minister, who resisted only by clutching the wooden rostrum. The brawl ensued as supporters of Mr. Yatsenyuk rushed to his defense, and then fought with backers of Mr. Barna.

Obama has called the Islamic State the "face of evil"

Pope Francis suggests the West already is at war -- a kind of "third world war."

We are effectively at war with ISIS right now. A U.S.-led coalition has been bombing targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, and in recent months Russia has been doing the same.

These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.

this doesn’t just go for outsider candidates like Mr. Carson and Donald Trump. Insider politicians like Marco Rubio are simply engaged in a different, classier kind of scam — and they are empowered in part by the way the grifters have defined respectability down.

About the grifters: Start with the lowest level, in which marketers use political affinity to sell get-rich-quick schemes, miracle cures, and suchlike

One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.

The dirtiest word in the marxist vocabulary is “neoliberal,” which stands for an economy based on capitalist principles and processes. Students have learned that “neoliberal” is equivalent to evil. Two students, independently, recently said to me that “we need to replace capitalism,” although they had no suggestions about what to replace it with. That half the world tried to replace capitalism in the 20th century, with disastrous results, they apparently had no idea. That capitalism has brought unparalleled prosperity, if not peace and happiness, is unknown to students. They have been taught that the only products of capitalism are exploitation and oppression. Globalization is taught as the expansion of exploitation and oppression worldwide. The great economic developments in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the economic progress in Africa, is terra incognita to students, taught only problems but no successes.

For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true

In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”

over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).

a dinosaur looking up into the heavens at night, at all the twinkling stars. His smiling face utters the words: “The dot that gets bigger and bigger each night is my favorite.”

The most striking thing about Bret Stephens’s inaugural column in the New York Times was not its banal defense of the principle of scientific skepticism, but its general lameness. Rereading it this week, it is striking how modest its claims were. They essentially came to this: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

The denialists, in other words, have nothing left

The university’s exasperated president, Michael Ignatieff, said at a news conference that despite “many declarations and expressions of support” from U.S. and E.U. leaders, the West was ultimately toothless in defense of its principles. “No leverage has been exerted on the government of Hungary from outside,” he said. 

Reaction from E.U. officials Monday was muted. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David B. Cornstein confirmed that he had never tried to use either incentives or threats to sway Orban, despite proclaiming upon arrival in Budapest in June that his top mission was to keep CEU in the country. With that effort having failed, he blamed the university’s founder — Hungarian American financier George Soros — for CEU’s departure and refused to criticize Orban. Cornstein also minimized the university’s importance — and appeared baffled by why the school’s fate had generated wider interest.   “It doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom,” Cornstein said. 

CEU has long been considered among the world’s finest graduate schools, attracting students from across the globe, and it is widely seen as the best in Hungary. 

about third parties. There are ways to deal with them without totally discounting a lot of votes. Maine has come up with a system where everybody can rank their preferences on the ballot. If nobody gets over 50 percent of the first choices, the last candidate gets tossed out and her supporters’ next preferences come into play.

“A third party will always be a spoiler one way or the other,” said Sean Wilentz, an expert on American political history at Princeton. In the end, Wilentz said, people who vote for a third party often wind up helping the candidate they’d least like to see win.

Allen Strouse is not the archetypal Trump voter whom journalists discover in Rust Belt diners. He is a queer Catholic poet and scholar of medieval literature who teaches at the New School in New York City. He voted for Mr. Trump “as a protest against the Democrats’ failures on economic issues,” but the psychological dimensions of his vote intrigue him. “Having studied Freudian analysis, and being in therapy for 10 years, I couldn’t not reflexively ask myself, ‘How does this decision have to do with my psychology?’” he told me.

their preoccupation with childhood and “primitive and irrational wishes and fears” have influenced the study of authoritarianism ever since.

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.

while I yield to nobody in my appreciation of the right’s fiscal fraudulence, I took its monetary hawkishness seriously. I thought that all those dire warnings about the inflationary consequences of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to fight high unemployment, the constant harping on the evils of printing money, were grounded in genuine — stupid, but genuine — concern.Silly me.

it is a shock to see so many conservative voices — including, incredibly, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal — echoing Trump’s demands.

It’s hard to overstate just how consistent and intense The Journal and others of like mind used to be in their attacks on easy money. Many commentators have noted that three years ago The Journal declared that low interest rates are bad for the economy. But that was minor compared with the newspaper’s pronouncements during the financial crisis. For example, it attacked and ridiculed Ben Bernanke for cutting interest rates in December 2008 — that is, at a time when the economy was in free fall, and desperately needed all the support it could get.

“The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” claims that social justice is not, in fact, a definitional component of the gospel, and that it is heresy to elevate “non-essentials to the status of essentials.” As you might expect, the document affirms traditional beliefs on same-sex relationships and “God-ordained” gender roles. But it seems particularly focused on rejecting collective blame in racial matters. “We deny that . . . any person is morally culpable for another person’s sin,” the statement argues. “We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.”

In case this wasn’t clear enough, the document goes on: “We reject any teaching that encourages racial groups to view themselves as privileged oppressors or entitled victims of oppression. . . . We deny that a person’s feelings of offense or oppression necessarily prove that someone else is guilty of sinful behaviors, oppression or prejudice.” Christians, in the view of MacArthur and his fellow signatories, must condemn both “racial animosity” and “racial vainglory.”

The MacArthur statement is designed to support not a gospel truth but a social myth. The United States, the myth goes, used to have systematic discrimination, but that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism is now purely an individual issue, for which the good people should not be blamed. This narrative has nothing to do with true religion. It has everything to do with ignorant self-satisfaction.

Beyond the Areopagitica’s condemnation of censorship, Milton was really defending the underlying spiritual and intellectual chaos, and the institutions that nourished it. In his lifetime, the printing press had changed everything.

He accorded books religious significance, which was really the highest compliment he could offer, since he took his religion so seriously: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye ...

At the core, Milton was defending something intensely private—the conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive at their own religious conviction. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

So this was a premeditated, conscious attempt to hurt vulnerable children in order to deter future would-be asylum seekers who might bring their kids with them. It was an instrumental cruelty in which children were not seen as subjective beings to be protected but as objects to be used. It wasn’t a policy designed to be hidden, but to be broadcast.

A Trump administration official said Tuesday he warned for months about the potential for harm to migrant children if they were separated from their parents before the administration launched its “zero tolerance” border policy earlier this year.

Shklar puts it this way: “No child can deserve brutality. Punishment is justifiably inflicted in the service of retribution, education or public security; but if it goes away from, or beyond, these ends, we call it ‘cruel and unusual’ and forbid its use.”

The same thing is at work in the realms of journalism, politics, and infotainment. Viewers (i.e., citizens) are all too eager to indulge dumb, nasty, cruel, or nutty demagogues because they find such fare entertaining or psychologically comforting. Editors and television producers, hungry for clicks and eyeballs, are only too happy to invite people into their pages or onto their sets if they might bring those eyeballs and clicks with them

Politically, we live in a popular-front moment, where no one on “our side” is worth criticizing too much, if at all, and everyone on “their side” is evil. This has as much to do with ratings and page views as it does with ideology. Moths chase light, but the incentive for politicians, producers, and pundits is to follow the heat.