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A longtime acquaintance of the Missouri senator explained to me Hawley’s actions this way: “Hawley never wants to talk down to his voters. He wants to speak for them, and at the moment, they are saying the election was stolen.”“He surely knows this isn’t true,” this acquaintance continued, “and that the legal arguments don’t hold water. And yet clearly the incentives he confronts—as someone who wants to speak for those voters, and as someone with ambitions beyond the Senate—lead him to conclude he should pretend the lie is true. This is obviously a very bad sign about the direction of the GOP in the coming years.”  

Those who have hoped that Republicans like Senator Hawley would begin to break free from Trump once he lost the election have not understood the nature of the change that has come over the party’s base.

Trump was the product of deep, disturbing currents on the American right; he was not the creator of them. Those currents have existed for many decades; we saw them manifested in the popularity of figures such as Sarah Palin, Patrick J. Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North

Feudalism was the system in European medieval societies of the 10th to 13th centuries CE whereby a social hierarchy was established based on local administrative control and the distribution of land into units (fiefs). A landowner (lord) gave a fief, along with a promise of military and legal protection, in return for a payment of some kind from the person who received it (vassal).

military service or the regular payment of produce or money

The word ‘feudalism’ derives from the medieval Latin terms feudalis, meaning fee, and feodum, meaning fief

The Roman Empire, at its height (c. 117 CE), was the most extensive political and social structure in western civilization. By 285 CE the empire had grown too vast to be ruled from the central government at Rome and so was divided by Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE) into a Western and an Eastern Empire.

The Roman Empire began when Augustus Caesar (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) became the first emperor of Rome

In the east, it continued as the Byzantine Empire until the death of Constantine XI (r. 1449-1453 CE) and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE.

Four years ago, when Donald Trump first ran for president, he urged Black people to support him, asking us, “What have you got to lose?”

Four years later, we know exactly what we had to lose. Our lives, as we died in disproportionate numbers from the pandemic he has let flourish among us. Our wealth, as we have suffered disproportionately from the worst economic drop America has seen in 90 years. Our safety, as this president has stood behind those police who kill us in the streets and by the armies of white supremacy who march by night and scheme in the light of day

In his ignorance or his indifference, or perhaps in his contempt, Mr. Trump does not seem to understand the difference between promises made and promises kept.

"It is incredible, as chief law enforcement officer in this country, to equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives."

Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. For hundreds of years, enslaved Africans were beaten, tortured, raped and treated as property.

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter of a millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired,

We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.

Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

In 1996 the political scientist Samuel Huntington offered several strong claims about the post-Cold War world.

Global politics was becoming not just “multipolar” but “multicivilizational,” he argued, with competing powers modernizing along different cultural lines, not simply converging with the liberal West.

“The balance of power among civilizations” was shifting, and the West was entering a period of relative decline.

“Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”

The billionaire class has long leaned on farmers and ranchers to beat back efforts to tax inheritances more heavily. This year, the tactic worked to kill a proposal from Mr. Biden that would have set the value of inherited assets at their original purchase price, not their worth at the time of the original owner’s death.

“Not only does it distort discussion of incredibly important policy,” he said, “it ends up advancing the interest of this very small number of people and industries that have a chokehold on public policy in Washington.”

Beginning in the eighth century B.C., Ancient Rome grew from a small town on central Italy’s Tiber River into an empire that at its peak encompassed most of continental Europe, Britain, much of western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean islands

After 450 years as a republic, Rome became an empire in the wake of Julius Caesar

s rise and fall in the first century B.C.

At Cambridge, professors and students alike are afraid to speak critically, or at all, on the subject of gender.

Believing that biological sex is binary and unchangeable – and that gender is culturally constructed – may not seem controversial. Yet gender-critical feminists who hold such mainstream views are often slapped with a derogatory label: Terf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

heir beliefs, let’s remember, are far from radical: they think that conflating gender with sex leads to violations of the rights of women, children and gay and lesbian people.

In a January 30 interview newly installed Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya told New York Times reporter Liz Harris that after the deal to acquire Simon & Schuster fell through, he envisions a new strategy for increasing market share. “Much of its growth will have to come organically—by selling more books. Mr. Malaviya said that, hopefully, A.I. will help, making it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees.”

It’s about the very American and capitalist idea that more is always better: that constantly churning out new products will help companies achieve year over year growth which, of course, is the paramount goal

heir authors increasingly wonder if they should reach inside their own wallets and hire outside help, not because the people working on their books are too lazy to do their jobs, but because freelance publicists and marketers are more likely to have the bandwidth to be thorough.