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the program offers tips on “how to verbally and nonverbally communicate empathy and support” while wearing a mask

Or, Ms. Driscoll said, “when someone is defensive and losing their rationality, you give them a choice or set a limit.”

inquiries to the organization for de-escalation information have doubled since the pandemic started

The National Retail Federation said it did not have data on disputes at retailers

Many retail workers will receive a new sort of preparation for this year’s holiday season: training on how to manage conflicts with customers who resist mask-wearing, social distancing and store capacity limits

American adults say they're drinking 14% more often during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report in the journal JAMA Network Open. The increase in frequency of drinking for women was more pronounced, up 17% compared to last year.

Stores sold 54% more alcohol in late March compared the year prior, according to Nielsen.

"Alcohol compromises the body's immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes," the WHO stated. "Therefore, people should minimize their alcohol consumption at any time, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Two weeks after the killing of George Floyd, crowds inspired by Black Lives Matter protests in America marched to the statue of a slave trader named Edward Colston in the center of the English port city of Bristol. They wrapped ropes around the neck of the bronze effigy, pulled it to the pavement, rolled and dragged it through the streets, and then pushed it into the harbor.

Colston was Bristol's biggest philanthropist. His name adorned the city's concert hall, an office tower, as well as schools and streets. The plaque beneath the statue, which was erected in 1895, called him "one of the most virtuous and wise sons" of Bristol. What it failed to mention – and what angered the protesters – is that Colston made much of his fortune with the Royal African Company, which shipped tens of thousands of enslaved people across the Atlantic to work on plantations during Colston's tenure. An estimated one in five people died during the crossing.

A reader poll in the Bristol Post found about 60% of respondents backed protesters pulling down the statue, while around 40% thought it shouldn't have been toppled.

Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, who has lived in Washington and Philadelphia, has had his own unnerving experiences with American police. He said he was flabbergasted when a cop in the U.S. once threatened to arrest him for jaywalking

After that, Rees says, he changed the way he dealt with police in the U.S. When asking for directions in New York City one day, he made sure to speak as he took care to approach an officer from the front.

Some white residents were doubly angry. They were still mad that the Colston statue had been pulled down illegally and that another statue had gone up without government authorization or public input.

"I think it's beautiful," Aidid said. "It stands for so much that Bristol has needed. When I walked past here today, I finally felt like it's not a direct insult to my humanity, to my life."

The next morning, government workers unbolted the statue and took it down, leaving the pedestal empty, once again.

In July, a London sculptor had his own statue hoisted up on the pedestal. It depicted a Black female protester holding her fist up in a Black power salute.

The acquittal was “an unprecedented failure of American democracy,” and “a triumph of madness,” said Roland Nelles, a Washington correspondent for the German outlet Der Spiegel,

“The U.S. remains in a precarious situation,” Li Haidong, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University, wrote in The Global Times, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party of China.

"Probably the only thing Barack Obama and I have in common is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world's most overrated General. I asked for his letter of resignation, & felt great about. His nickname was 'Chaos', which I didn't like, & changed it to 'Mad Dog,' " Trump said on Twitter.

The adviser went on to note the Nazi reference in the statement -- Mattis said, "The Nazi slogan for destroying us...was 'Divide and Conquer.' Our American answer is 'In Union there is Strength.' We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics" -- was particularly pointed. "That will leave a mark," the adviser said.

"It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them."

"With regard to whether the President has confidence, I would say if he loses confidence in Secretary Esper, I'm sure you all will be the first to know," McEnany said during Wednesday's press briefing.

"Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."

Calls for police divestment are a dominant theme of protesters’ policy demands. The radical idea is a product of how increased policing “has eaten up so much state and national resources at the expense of investment in black and brown communities,” says Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who worked to overhaul departments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Missouri, as the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.  

At the federal level, protesters and civil-rights groups are urging Congress to pass, among other reforms, a national prohibition on chokeholds; the elimination of federal programs that offer military equipment to local law enforcement; the creation of a national public database of abusive police officers; and an end to qualified immunity, a doctrine that prevents police from being held liable in certain cases for breaking the law.

“Moments of passion pass and then you have to have people who are still at the table pushing.”

But the protests aren’t all about politics or policy goals, organizers and protesters told me. They’ve been an outlet for black Americans to express their hurt and fury that 400 years after the start of slavery, five decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and six years after the police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, black Americans are still two and a half times more likely to be killed by police than white people. They are dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people. And they’re more likely than white Americans to have lost jobs in the economic catastrophe spawned by the pandemic

“I remember a movie called Network. I remember [the news anchor] going to the window and saying ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” she told me. That’s how she says she felt when she saw the video of Floyd’s arrest.

Although the Trump administration did not reverse the mercury rule entirely, the modifications were intended to make clear that Trump officials disagree with the Obama administration’s basis for drafting it in the first place, and that the new rule is “correcting flaws” in the logic. They say that the costs of complying with the mercury rule would exceed the environmental benefit. Environmentalists worry that the changes could limit regulators’ ability to control toxins in the future.

The Trump administration’s squabbling over the rule drove McCarthy “absolutely nuts,” she said. “That’s when I realized what they were doing made no sense from a standard-setting process. It was just to destroy everything that had been done before. It had no explanation otherwise.”

Unfortunately, the February Revolution also mimicked the French Revolution by giving way to anarchy, violence and repression. As Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government floundered, Petrograd’s expatriates watched in horror as the air of optimism quickly grew toxic. Their diaries and letters detail the descent into violence as looting and killing became a common occurrence.

The February Revolution had surprised the Bolsheviks as much as anyone, and they were not powerful enough to take control early in 1917, Rappaport says. The return of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin from exile, however, galvanized the radical socialists. By the fall of 1917, the residents of Petrograd were so desperate for relief from the seemingly endless chaos that they cared little about who could bring it.

Rappaport says the first-hand accounts of Americans and other foreigners in Petrograd are valuable because they provide an unvarnished window into the events of 1917. “These were private citizens writing personal diary entries or letters. They didn’t have a particular political agenda. I looked at Russian accounts and had to wade through so much tedious politics. Their response, though, was natural and instinctive.”

it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient

Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves

There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.

The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.

with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.

Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it

He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.

LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.

More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures

No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.

The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad

Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.

Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.

Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.

The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.

Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.

Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.

It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.

the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities

One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”

The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.

the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.

It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.

When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.

That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too

the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.

Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.

In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.

what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?

The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.

in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.

To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.

Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds

It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment

It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.

Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3

Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States

The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years

In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.

this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.

While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown

The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains

Last year, a Chinese scientist he worked with published a specific forecast: “It is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.”

Humans today are exposed to more deadly new pathogens than ever. They typically come from animals, as global travel, trade and economic development, such as meat production and deforestation, push people, livestock and wildlife closer together

Scientists knew infectious disease outbreaks were becoming more common, with 2010 having more than six times the outbreaks of pathogens from animal origins than in 1980, according to data in a study by Brown University researchers.

Yet plenty was left undone, in areas including funding, early-warning systems, the role of the WHO and coordination with China. A big chunk of U.S. funding went toward protecting Americans against a bioterror attack. Government funding for pandemics has come largely in emergency, one-time packages to stop an ongoing outbreak.

She said a better solution would be to fund public health more like national defense, with much more guaranteed money, year in, year out.

“Will there be another human influenza pandemic?” Dr. Webster asked in a paper presented at an NIH meeting in 1995. “The certainty is that there will be.”

Experts including Dr. Webster were particularly concerned about the potential for spillover in southern China, where large, densely populated cities were expanding rapidly into forests and agricultural lands, bringing people into closer contact with animals. Two of the three influenza pandemics of the 20th century are thought to have originated in China.

Dr. Webster and others warned it could re-emerge or mutate into something more contagious. With U.S. funding, he set up an animal influenza surveillance center in Hong Kong. The WHO, which hadn’t planned for pandemics before, started compiling protocols for a large-scale outbreak, including contingency plans for vaccines.

At a dinner back in the U.S., he remembers one guest saying, “Oh, you really needed to have someone in the U.S. to be impacted to really galvanize the government.”

That “drove home the reality in my own mind of globalization,” said Dr. Fukuda. SARS showed that viruses can crisscross the globe by plane in hours, making a local epidemic much more dangerous.

The WHO’s director-general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, publicly criticized China. The government under new leaders reversed course. It implemented draconian quarantines and sanitized cities, including a reported 80 million people enlisted to clean streets in Guangdong.

By May 2003, the number of new SARS cases was dwindling. It infected around 8,000 people world-wide, killing nearly 10%.

After SARS, China expanded epidemiologist training and increased budgets for new laboratories. It started working more closely in public health with the U.S., the world’s leader. The U.S. CDC opened an office in Beijing to share expertise and make sure coverups never happened again. U.S. CDC officials visiting a new China CDC campus planted a friendship tree.

In Washington in 2005, a powerful player started driving U.S. efforts to become more prepared. President George W. Bush had read author John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic

Mr. Bush leaned toward the group of 10 or so officials and said, “I want to see a plan,” according to Dr. Venkayya. “He had been asking questions and not getting answers,” recalled Dr. Venkayya, now president of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. ’s global vaccine business unit. “He wanted people to see this as a national threat.”

Mr. Bush launched the strategy in November, and Congress approved $6.1 billion in one-time funding.

The CDC began exercises enacting pandemic scenarios and expanded research. The government created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to fund companies to develop diagnostics, drugs and vaccines.

A team of researchers also dug into archives of the 1918 pandemic to develop guidelines for mitigating the spread when vaccines aren’t available. The tactics included social distancing, canceling large public gatherings and closing schools—steps adopted this year when Covid-19 struck, though at the time they didn’t include wide-scale lockdowns.

A year after the plan was released, a progress report called for more real-time disease surveillance and preparations for a medical surge to care for large numbers of patients, and stressed strong, coordinated federal planning.

A European vaccine makers’ association said its members had spent around $4 billion on pandemic vaccine research and manufacturing adjustments by 2008.

The $6.1 billion Congress appropriated for Mr. Bush’s pandemic plan was spent mostly to make and stockpile medicines and flu vaccines and to train public-health department staff. The money wasn’t renewed. “The reality is that for any leader it’s really hard to maintain a focus on low-probability high-consequence events, particularly in the health arena,” Dr. Venkayya said.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama’s administration put Mr. Bush’s new plan into action for the first time. By mid-June, swine flu, as it was dubbed, had jumped to 74 countries. The WHO officially labeled it a pandemic, despite some evidence suggesting the sickness was pretty mild in most people.

That put in motion a host of measures, including some “sleeping” contracts with pharmaceutical companies to begin vaccine manufacturing—contracts that countries like the United Kingdom had negotiated ahead of time so they wouldn’t have to scramble during an outbreak.

In August, a panel of scientific advisers to Mr. Obama published a scenario in which as many as 120 million Americans, 40% of the population, could be infected that year, and up to 90,000 people could die.

H1N1 turned out to be much milder. Although it eventually infected more than 60 million Americans, it killed less than 13,000. In Europe, fewer than 5,000 deaths were reported.

The WHO came under fire for labeling the outbreak a pandemic too soon. European lawmakers, health professionals and others suggested the organization may have been pressured by the pharmaceutical industry.

France ordered 94 million doses, but had logged only 1,334 serious cases and 312 deaths as of April 2010. It managed to cancel 50 million doses and sell some to other countries, but it was still stuck with a €365 million tab, or about $520 million at the time, and 25 million extra doses.

The WHO had raised scares for SARS, mad-cow disease, bird flu and now swine flu, and it had been wrong each time, said Paul Flynn, a member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly and a British lawmaker, at a 2010 health committee hearing in Strasbourg.

Ultimately, an investigation by the council’s committee accused the WHO and public-health officials of jumping the gun, wasting money, provoking “unjustified fear” among Europeans and creating risks through vaccines and medications that might not have been sufficiently tested.

“I thought you might have uttered a word of regret or an apology,” Mr. Flynn told Dr. Fukuda, who as a representative of the WHO had been called to testify.

Back in Washington, scientist Dennis Carroll, at the U.S. Agency for International Development, was also convinced that flu wasn’t the only major pandemic threat. In early 2008, Dr. Carroll was intrigued by Dr. Daszak’s newly published research that said viruses from wildlife were a growing threat, and would emerge most frequently where development was bringing people closer to animals.

If most of these viruses spilled over to humans in just a few places, including southern China, USAID could more easily fund an early warning system.

“You didn’t have to look everywhere,” he said he realized. “You could target certain places.” He launched a new USAID effort focused on emerging pandemic threats. One program called Predict had funding of about $20 million a year to identify pathogens in wildlife that have the potential to infect people.

Drs. Daszak, Shi and Wang, supported by funds from Predict, the NIH and China, shifted their focus to Yunnan, a relatively wild and mountainous province that borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.

One key discovery: a coronavirus resembling SARS that lab tests showed could infect human cells. It was the first proof that SARS-like coronaviruses circulating in southern China could hop from bats to people. The scientists warned of their findings in a study published in the journal Nature in 2013.

Evidence grew that showed people in the area were being exposed to coronaviruses. One survey turned up hundreds of villagers who said they recently showed symptoms such as trouble breathing and a fever, suggesting a possible viral infection.

Over the next several years, governments in the U.S. and elsewhere found themselves constantly on the defensive from global viral outbreaks. Time and again, preparedness plans proved insufficient. One, which started sickening people in Saudi Arabia and nearby

On a weekend morning in January 2013, more than a dozen senior Obama administration officials met in a basement family room in the suburban home of a senior National Security Council official. They were brainstorming how to help other countries upgrade their epidemic response capabilities, fueled by bagels and coffee. Emerging disease threats were growing, yet more than 80% of the world’s countries hadn’t met a 2012 International Health Regulations deadline to be able to detect and respond to epidemics.

The session led to the Global Health Security Agenda, launched by the U.S., the WHO and about 30 partners in early 2014, to help nations improve their capabilities within five years.

Money was tight. The U.S. was recovering from the 2008-09 financial crisis, and federal funding to help U.S. states and cities prepare and train for health emergencies was declining. Public-health departments had cut thousands of jobs, and outdated data systems weren’t replaced.

“It was a Hail Mary pass,” said Tom Frieden, who was director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017 and a force behind the creation of the GHSA. “We didn’t have any money.”

At the WHO, Dr. Fukuda was in charge of health security. When the Ebola outbreak was found in March 2014, he and his colleagues were already stretched, after budget cuts and amid other crises.

The United Nations created a special Ebola response mission that assumed the role normally played by the WHO. Mr. Obama sent the U.S. military to Liberia, underscoring the inability of international organizations to fully handle the problem.

It took the WHO until August to raise an international alarm about Ebola. By then, the epidemic was raging. It would become the largest Ebola epidemic in history, with at least 28,600 people infected, and more than 11,300 dead in 10 countries. The largest outbreak before that, in Uganda, had involved 425 cases.

Congress passed a $5.4 billion package in supplemental funds over five years, with about $1 billion going to the GHSA. The flood of money, along with aggressive contact tracing and other steps, helped bring the epidemic to a halt, though it took until mid-2016.

Global health experts and authorities called for changes at the WHO to strengthen epidemic response, and it created an emergencies program. The National Security Council warned that globalization and population growth “will lead to more pandemics,” and called for the U.S. to do more.

r. Carroll of USAID, who had visited West Africa during the crisis, and saw some health workers wrap themselves in garbage bags for protection, started conceiving of a Global Virome Project, to detect and sequence all the unknown viral species in mammals and avian populations on the planet.

Billionaire Bill Gates warned in a TED talk that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than nuclear war, and urged world leaders to invest more in preparing for one. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation helped form a new initiative to finance vaccines for emerging infections, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

Congress established a permanent Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Fund for the CDC in fiscal 2019, with $50 million for that year and $85 million in fiscal 2020.

In May 2018, John Bolton, then President Trump’s national security adviser, dismantled an NSC unit that had focused on global health security and biodefense, with staff going to other units. The senior director of the unit left.

It pushed emerging disease threats down one level in the NSC hierarchy, making pandemics compete for attention with issues such as North Korea, said Beth Cameron, a previous senior director of the unit. She is now vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Deteriorating relations with China reduced Washington’s activities there just as researchers were becoming more certain of the threat from coronaviruses.

Dr. Carroll had earlier been ordered to suspend his emerging pandemic threats program in China.

Dr. Carroll pitched to USAID his Global Virome Project. USAID wasn’t interested, he said. He left USAID last year. A meeting that Dr. Carroll planned for last August with the Chinese CDC and Chinese Academy of Sciences to form a Chinese National Virome Project was postponed due to a bureaucratic hang-up. Plans to meet are now on hold, due to Covid-19.

For one thing, people truly focused on restarting the economy should have been big supporters of measures to limit infections without hurting business — above all, getting Americans to wear face masks.

Also, politicians eager to see the economy bounce back should have wanted to sustain consumer purchasing power until wages recovered

Instead, Senate Republicans ignored the looming July 31 expiration of special unemployment benefits, which means that tens of millions of workers are about to see a huge hit to their incomes, damaging the economy as a whole.

there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.

In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.

I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.

Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.

This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.

Indeed, it sometimes seems as if right-wingers actually make a point of behaving irresponsibly. Remember how Senator Rand Paul, who was worried that he might have Covid-19 (he did), wandered around the Senate and even used the gym while waiting for his test results?

Anger at any suggestion of social responsibility also helps explain the looming fiscal catastrophe. It’s striking how emotional many Republicans get in their opposition to the temporary rise in unemployment benefits; for example, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that these benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies.” Why such hatred?

It’s not because the benefits are making workers unwilling to take jobs. There’s no evidence that this is happening — it’s just something Republicans want to believe

Again, it’s the principle. Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens. And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.

And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.

Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk

over in America, it seemed to be a riff on “Live free or die”, the actual state motto of New Hampshire. To me it looked more like live free and die. Continue congregating secretly or publicly in groups exceeding 10,000 for prayer, weddings and other celebrations? Check. Cover only your mouth, free your nose? Check. Social distancing? You gotta be kidding.

Flying back to Sydney on US election day was momentous. It also felt like whiplash. The Australian governments swung into action even before we stepped off the plane in Sydney. Once in the terminal it was full-on with precise coordination across jurisdictions and levels of government – immigration, biosecurity, state health authorities, police, army, air force

It embarrassed me that an air force officer was pushing my baggage trolley as he escorted me to my room. Of course this wasn’t a courtesy: he was there to make sure that I was securely locked in my room without a key, open window or balcony for escape.

Australia has shown that the response to a pandemic needs to be strict. Lives and a nation’s economy hang in the balance. The response needs to be evidence-based. Precise. Coordinated. Thorough. Caring. Impartial. Transparent. Legally enacted and enforced. Strongly led and clearly communicated. Tough. Really tough. Because that’s what it takes to control a pandemic.

We have to stand together!” He seemed to both sense and reject the idea that Trump has made it hard to do that.

In 2016, the N.F.L. player Colin Kaepernick declined to stand for the pre-game playing of the national anthem, saying that he could not “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” Trump won praise from his political base by condemning Kaepernick as un-American.

n 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white-supremacist rally featured the American flag, but most of the marchers carried Confederate flags and swastika banners. After one of the white supremacists plowed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing one of them, Heather Heyer, the far right appeared to rebrand, according to Bethan Johnson, a University of Cambridge scholar and a fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right

Recently, Trump suggested a mandatory year in jail for anyone who desecrates the flag. (Burning or otherwise desecrating the flag is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which Trump had cited in his defense of the flag at Mar-a-Lago.) In August, Trump held the final night of the Republican National Convention, for the first time American history, at the White House; aides built a stage on the South Lawn and loaded it with fifty-four American flags.

Outraged veterans started showing up at the funerals en masse, on motorcycles, to provide protection and emotional support to the families of the dead. They flew American flags on their choppers and drowned out protestors’ chants by revving their engines. These counter-demonstrators became the Patriot Guard Riders, a nonpartisan group with chapters nationwide. The Riders required only that members demonstrate “unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America’s freedom and security.” An early leader once said, “We show families in grieving communities that America still cares.”

The flag has represented different ideas at different times in American history: during the Revolution, it was a sign of radical democracy, though the eagle was the more dominant emblem; in the eighteen-forties, it stood for anti-immigration politics; during the Civil War, it was used by both anti- and pro-slavery causes; in the eighteen-nineties, the Pledge of Allegiance was created, and waves of immigrants were given flags as part of their “Americanization”; during the Vietnam era, it was seen as a pro-war symbol. Immediately after 9/11, the flag had a more unifying presence; with the invasion of Iraq, during the Presidency of George W. Bush, it also became synonymous with the U.S. military.

the American flag “moves from one meaning to another.”

Teachout associates the Trump-era use of the flag with a “rhetoric of threat and strength and defense,” and told me that, in certain hands, the flag seems to serve as “a kind of legitimacy” for some of these groups “in terms of how they think of themselves.” Trump’s flag rhetoric rarely involves “the language of sacrifice or shared purpose. It’s about fighting and winning.”

The conflation of Trump and the flag has become so pervasive that progressives have reported feeling reluctant to buy property in areas rife with the flag. Just before the 2018 midterm elections, Bruce Watson, a writer living in western Massachusetts, lamented that liberals and progressives had “shied away from the flag.” He warned that “ceding the nation’s most enduring symbol to one party is just bad politics” and said the flag is “the symbol of ‘we, the people’ ”—including those who “staunchly oppose the president’s policies and behavior.” Watson noted, “Even if it festoons every Trump rally, the flag belongs to all of us.” What Teachout noted more than a decade ago holds true today: “The story of the flag is a story of a country in search of itself.”

The silent majority, if you will,” Hartley said

The people on the bridge had several things in common. All were white. They told me that they get their information from Fox News; the woman from Iowa also listens to Rush Limbaugh. None believed news reports that Trump had repeatedly disparaged members of the military, calling the American war dead “losers and suckers.” Carr said he could not accept that Trump made such comments, then added, “Even if he did say it, look at how much he’s done for us.”

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty’s recent entry into the genre, places inequality as the ultimate driving force of politics, society, and religion

The Upswing proposes another, similar arc

this one is “a long arc of increasing solidarity and then increasing individualism” which “had implications for equality, for politics, for social capital, and for culture. It led to an increasingly zero-sum, tribal view of society, and, eventually, to Trumpism.”

The evidence justifying the thesis, intriguing as it is, is not nearly so strong.

The authors assign ultimate importance to the route from individualism to communitarianism and back again, called the “I-we-I” curve in their shorthand.

Was it possible for America to become a society of solidarity, a “we” society (as Putnam and Garrett term it), only because it was a Mad Men one, undergirded by the exclusion of blacks and women?

Many concurrent transformations, of course, could also have driven these trends

Putnam and Garrett nonetheless present a clear story. They propose that the communitarian ethos of the Progressive Era—of muckrakers like Ida B. Wells and Jacob Riis and social reformers like the suffragette Jane Addams and education evangelist John Dewey—is the generating impulse of the upswing. And the various traumas of the 1960s—assassinations, campus violence, the civil-rights struggle, urban riots, the Vietnamese debacle—are proposed as the instigators for the downswing.

Google’s ambition to digitize millions of books has yielded a database that the curious can use to check trends in English usage over decades with only a few keystrokes. Putnam and Garrett rely on this tool to track the rate of usage of “we” compared to “I”—and find that the resulting curve traces the familiar U-turn that recurs everywhere else in the book.

Similar accounts of increasing selfishness fossilized in Google Books data have been offered before, most notably by the psychologist Jean Twenge, but they do not seem to be taken that seriously by many linguists.

My brief experimentation also showed that writers also discuss “you” more than “I” these days. From these analogies, one could conclude the exact opposite: a resurrected communitarianism after all.

Other attempts at constructing a meta-narrative for American history, like the recent These Truths by Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore, place at their center the crisis of race and the centuries-long inability of whites to accept blacks as equal.

What evidence is there that, in the midst of all of these bewildering changes, it was really “most fundamentally the self-centeredness” that accounted for present-day malaise?

the argument is that “America took its foot off the gas”—so the drive toward equality decelerated and stalled. “As that ‘we’ came apart, racial progress in many important realms came to a halt,” they claim

This is certainly true in some respects. But it does feel like a disservice to give the overriding impression that to be black in 2020 is only marginally better than it was in 197

In fact, there has been substantial convergence in life expectancy, high-school graduation rates, and voter turnout between black and white Americans, for example. And the notion that the communitarian ethos of the “we” society reinforces the drive toward equality for the disadvantaged is difficult to square with the continuous progress of women,

By reaching further back in time than most academics ever venture (because data are scant and require more care to interpret), he and Garrett are able to focus on a more positive period in which the United States was broadly improving, when children could expect almost surely to earn more than their parents, and Congress was not wrecked by partisanship. It cannot be wrong to yearn for a time when progress was palpable, when projects like the Great Society were being proposed and enacted. Even if we do not precisely know the reasons for the upswing all those years ago, one happened all the same.

What should this relief involve? It should provide support for the unavoidably unemployed, sustain businesses through the dark months ahead and aid state and local governments that are suffering severe declines in revenues and that will otherwise be forced to make drastic cuts in essential services.

For Americans who won’t be able to return to work while the pandemic is still raging, a one-time payment of $600 is grossly inadequate, while for those who haven’t lost their jobs it’s unnecessary.

President Trump is still trying, in ever more desperate and destructive ways, to overturn the results of the election. And in his madness he may imagine that he will gain more politically from sending everyone another check with his name on it than from helping those truly in need.

With Trump, evil is always better when it’s also a bargain.

Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.”

over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016.

For besieged social conservatives and Christianists in America, Putin loomed like some phantasm of strange hope.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative. It’s happened in a couple of ways. The first is that there really is no legitimate defense — even at CPAC, the fetid armpit of the Trump right — of sending troops and tanks into a neighboring country to teach it a lesson in submission to Mother Russia

If you’re Bannon, you can still try and wing it, but the sheer sight of bombed hospitals, murdered children, homeless seniors, and mortar explosions in residential neighborhoods tends to shape public opinion overnight.

Secondly, and perhaps most important, Putin is failing. He looks weak. The visual of a vast, stalled, vulnerable convoy of trucks on its way — or not — to Kyiv is now a metaphor for Putin’s presidency.

Putin has also done something no US president has been able to do in decades: rally Europe around NATO, get NATO countries to re-arm (finally), and give them a new and pointed mission: the deterrence of Russia

Putin’s blunder has revealed, in fact, that the West has a unique new weapon in the history of global warfare that can end wars almost before they begin: an economic kill-switch. The vast and complex set of financial, economic, and travel sanctions that the West unveiled this past fortnight and is imposing on Russia — effectively removing it from international banking and most international trade — is something no country can survive for very long.

if the EU is able to ramp up nuclear power (as France and Britain are), allow more fracking, and keep its investment in renewables surging, Russia’s entire carbon-based economy will have an expiration date attached to it.

None of this was supposed to happen. The West wasn’t supposed to unite this expeditiously; the EU wasn’t expected to find a new and confident voice; Russia’s access to global finance wasn’t supposed to be severed overnight; and a senile American president wasn’t supposed to corral a massive coalition to marginalize and isolate Russia on the global stage.

“Everything the [far right] wanted to perceive as decadent and weak has proven strong and brave; everything they wanted to represent as fearsome and powerful has revealed itself as brutal and stupid

so a president recently celebrated as a mastermind on the world stage has allowed his ancient fantasies of imperial glory to kick-start his own country’s economic and social collapse. Putin emerges from this as neither smart nor strong; he is, in fact, dumb and increasingly weak.

That’s why he’s a useful insight into what reactionism actually is. It’s not really a politics; it’s a mood. It’s not really about the problems of the present; it’s about living in an imagined past, and believing that you alone can restore it by some mystical rhetorical magic.

It’s about “subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.

Trump longs for the 1950s in America — just as Putin longs for the USSR of the same period

Wrapped up in nationalism, provoked by left-extremism, corralled by skillful demagogues, this longing can be a path to power. It can bring tyrants into office. But it cannot work in practice — because the world is different now. We live in 2022. America will never have the cultural and relative demographic homogeneity of the 1950s again. Never.

“White nationalism” in the most ethnically diverse democracy in human history is a kind of insanity — perpetuated by woke leftists and sad rightists. No wall, no president, no new immigration policy, no mass deportations, no book-bannings and no neo-Nazi rallies will bring it back. It’s gone.

globalization as a whole will not be undone. And because it will not be undone, exclusion from it will effectively remove any country from great power status in the foreseeable future. And so Putin has had his bluff called as well. If the sanctions hold, the danger from Russia henceforth will come from desperation, not ambition.

d this is often the risk of reactionary movements. The backlash they provoke can be lethal to their cause.

If Trudeau tried to freeze the bank accounts of political opponents, the West has chosen to cut an entire country off from global finance — to precipitate its collapse. The scale of this organized global cabal and the immensity of its power should alarm anyone. Putin’s hyper-nationalism has actually generated the most potent globalist power grab since the Cold War. And made it look reasonable.

Second, the legislature apparently decided that voter concerns about crime and disorder were nothing to worry about. After three decades of falling crime, Democrats had gotten complacent and disconnected, and failed to recognize that the bail reforms they passed in 2019, eliminating cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, were deeply unpopular.

Fair or not, the Republican message was quite simple: Bail reform passed by Democrats in Albany had created a wave of crime and disorder.

Sadly there is little evidence that Democratic leaders in Albany heard the alarm bells ringing on Long Island or saw the Adams victory in the city as a path forward.

Instead, in the face of crime rates rising some 30 percent in New York City, Democrats mostly denied that there was a crime problem on the scale that Republicans portrayed in frequent campaign ads. To the extent that Democrats acknowledged the growing disorder at all, they argued that there was no data showing that bail reforms affected crime — a claim at odds with the desire of many voters for stronger public safety, including locking up potentially dangerous people and giving judges the ability to consider dangerousness in making bail decisions.

the changes were too little and too late, and voters were unconvinced. New York remains the only state in the nation where in setting bail, judges cannot take into account whether a person arrested for a crime is a danger to the community

Remaining insulated from swing voters is a luxury that most members of the legislature enjoy because so many of them represent overwhelmingly Democratic districts in which elections are decided in low-turnout primaries.

Unfortunately for Democratic planning, in 2014 voters had passed an amendment to the state’s Constitution that was designed to prevent just this kind of extreme gerrymandering.

It set about drawing a congressional map that so blatantly overreached that a court struck it down, threw it out and turned the process over to a special master instead who drew a map that gave Republicans every opportunity to exploit Democratic failures around crime and disorder.

As a result, Democrats lost six congressional districts won by Joe Biden in 2020 — more than in any other state in the nation.

the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.

With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power

On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power).

They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers

Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.

one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.

the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts

Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues.

Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad

for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.

Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they wan

the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base

is so galling to these men that they declare the entire system to be broken.

they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying

These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict

In the past, when I’ve made the ‘where do you draw the line?’ argument to woke teachers, they dismiss the notion that any child might identify as an animal as a ‘red herring’. But it turns out, if you encourage kids to part company with biological reality, there’s nothing to stop them believing they’re cats or dinosaurs – or, indeed, red herring

Will doctors nod along enthusiastically when a teenage girl insists she’s a grub and then pack her off to surgery to have her arms and legs removed? Will a Labour government pass an act of parliament enabling ‘furries’ to marry cats and dogs?