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President Trump’s efforts to remain in office in defiance of democracy cannot be allowed to go unanswered, lest they invite more lawlessness from this president or those who follow.

Mr. Trump began undermining November’s election before the first vote was cast. Throughout the spring and summer, as the pandemic forced states to be more flexible with mail and absentee voting, he claimed repeatedly and without evidence that mail-in balloting would be rife with fraud.

The charges against Mr. Trump are clear: inciting an insurrection. The House could give him fair consideration without the lengthy hearings it required to impeach him in December 2019 after he strong-armed the Ukrainian president. The evidence now is not secondhand accounts of meetings and phone calls. The offenses occurred in public for weeks and then live on national television.

Kelly J. Baker is a writer and scholar of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. She sees frightening similarities between that culture and the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Many Americans associate the K.K.K. with white hoods, burning crosses and anti-Black racism but are less familiar with its white Protestant ambitions and antipathy toward Catholics and Jews. Dr. Baker explores that history in her book

White Christianity and this white supremacist Trump extremism are definitely not a new combination.

A group of more than 100 former Republican officials have discussed the possibility of forming a conservative party due to their unhappiness with the direction of the GOP under former President Donald Trump and the likelihood he'll be acquitted at the end of his second impeachment trial, according to Republicans who participated in the conversation.

"Clearly, there are a number of Republicans like myself and other Republican leaders, who want a clean break from President Trump, and we are kind of rallying around some core founding principles like truth and honesty, and democracy, and rule of law," the former Pennsylvania congressman, who is a CNN contributor, told CNN's Chris Cuomo Thursday.

The call came nearly a month after the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, when Trump supporters attempted to stop the certification of the 2020 election, believing the false claim promoted by Trump that it was stolen from him. One week later, the US House voted to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection," with 10 Republicans joining with Democrats.

Tens of thousands of people defied curfews to take to the streets of U.S. cities on Tuesday for an eighth night of protests over the death of a black man in police custody, as National Guard troops lined the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Clashes between protesters and police and looting of some stores in New York City gave way to relative quiet by night’s end.

In Los Angeles, numerous demonstrators who stayed out after the city’s curfew were arrested. But by late evening, conditions were quiet enough that local television stations switched from wall-to-wall coverage back to regular programming.

President Donald Trump's loyalists in the administration and on Capitol Hill have opened up an all-out assault against the Obama administration and former Vice President Joe Biden, using committee investigations and declassified documents to try to paint the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in an unflattering light.

The Republicans leading the investigations say they're about accountability and oversight, not politics. But the investigations are being openly cheered on by Trump, who told Republicans they need to get "tough" on issues like "unmasking," one of the areas where Grenell has provided newly declassified documents. The probes have also been endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, as he fights to keep the Senate majority in GOP hands in the 2020 election where the fate of Senate Republicans will be closely tied to Trump's.

So far, there's little dissent within the Senate GOP Conference about the pursuit of investigations against Trump's opponent -- even as many Republicans denounced House Democrats for mounting what they said were overtly political investigations and impeachment proceedings aimed at hurting the President's reelection chances.

Lawmakers are interrogating tech C.E.O.s on Capitol Hill while the Justice Department pursues a landmark antitrust case against Google. For decades, tech giants have avoided such scrutiny — hiding behind the idea that their products are free, beneficial, even beloved.

Ms. Khan served as counsel to the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee in this summer’s investigation, helping expose how Silicon Valley’s most revered companies use data and power to undercut, threaten and swallow up their competition.

Big Tech’s practices have had a “chilling effect” on the American economy, and that it’s time to drag the nation’s antitrust thinking out of the “ice age.”

In 1996, California became the first of 10 states to pass a ban on affirmative action at its public institutions, outlawing them from considering race or gender when offering people employment, education or contracting opportunities.

Proposition 16 ― a measure that made its way on to the California ballot amid a pandemic that largely affects Black and Latinx people and a reckoning against racist police violence ― could reverse that 1996 law, known as Prop 209. 

The motivation behind Prop 16 is that as soon as California banned its public institutions from using affirmative action

The members of the Electoral College will gather in their respective states on Monday to cast their official ballots for president. Ordinarily, the process is little more than a formal duty to rubber-stamp the results of the November election.

For weeks, President Trump and his allies have pressured Republican officials to ignore the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and appoint their own electors who would favor Mr. Trump. They have also asked courts to hand victory to the president in states he lost.

Electors for each state and the District of Columbia meet at a location chosen by the state legislature, most often the state’s capitol. The Delaware electors are meeting in a gym. Nevada is the only state holding its meeting virtually this year.

on Monday after the Electoral College certified President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, with many top Republicans saying the time had come to recognize results that have been evident for weeks.

While they insisted that Mr. Trump could still challenge the results in court, the senators said the certification should be considered the effective conclusion of an election that has fiercely divided the country.

“And I think once the Electoral College settles the issue today, it’s time for everybody to move on.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the first time acknowledged Joe Biden's victory and referred to him as President-elect, six weeks after Election Day and amid President Donald Trump's continued refusal to accept defeat.

"The electoral college has spoken," McConnell said in remarks from the Senate floor in the US Capitol, adding, "Today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden."

many Senate Republicans still wouldn't recognize Biden's victory on Monday evening even after the Electoral College made the win official.

Douthat believes — evidently quite deeply — that the biggest danger to the United States is the cultural left, which means he’s stuck. He cannot or will not face the full extent of the Republican party’s turn against democracy, and focuses his energy on downplaying it, perhaps in part to convince himself.

This encapsulates Douthat’s assessment of our historical moment: Yes, Trump is bad, but vigilance against anti-democracy forces on the American right is misguided because they’re so incredibly weak. The real threat is the left

Douthat continued (and continues) to underestimate the threat from the Trumpist-authoritarian right. He criticizes the Big Lie and January 6 less as threats to American democracy and more as hindrances to his vision of a “Trumpism without Trump.” In the December 5 column, he worried that “stop the steal” was crowding out “the more compelling narrative” that “Trump’s presidency demonstrated that populism can provide a foundation for conservatism.” After the Capitol attack, he lamented that, “By allowing his presidency to be possessed by the occult online, [Trump] sealed his legacy to the populist causes he sometimes pretended to serve.”

September 11, 2001 was supposed to be a typical day for Lieutenant Heather Penney of the District of Columbia Air National Guard. As Penney recalled in a 2016 interview with HISTORY, that morning she was attending a briefing at Andrews Air Force Base, planning the month’s training operations. At about 8:45 a.m., someone leaned into the room and said, “Hey, somebody just flew into the World Trade Center.”

The weather in New York City that day was very clear with blue skies. "We thought it was a small general aviation airplane or, you know, some small aircraft that maybe had...messed up their instrument approach," Penney recalled. It was assumed that a general aviation plane had made a terrible mistake, and they went back to their meeting.

They scrambled to the pre-flight area and donned their flight suits. There was no time to arm their F-16 fighter jets, so they would be flying this mission virtually unarmed, packing only their undaunted courage.

It hasn’t disappeared, of course, but in the years since #MeToo, many men have been trying to drop the stoicism and anger that have long warped masculinity.

For better or worse, everyone you know is watching “Ted Lasso.” The strong, silent type is losing some of his allure.

vulnerability was having a cultural moment — as the topic of popular TED talks and the focus of groups invested in helping men evolve, such as The ManKind Project and Evryman

“I traced a throughline: from Sandy Hook to Pizzagate to QAnon to Charlottesville and the coronavirus myths to the election lie that brought violence to the Capitol on January 6th,” she told Vox earlier this year. “I started to understand how individuals, for reasons of ideology or social status, tribalism, or for profit, were willing to reject established truths, and how once they’d done that, it was incredibly difficult to persuade them otherwise.”

She describes the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, CT as “a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in.”

the NYT’s Elizabeth Williamson about her book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, which was recently named one of the best books of 2022 by Publishers Weekly.

. I have studied and written about authoritarianism for years, and I think it’s important to pay attention to the views and motivations of voters who support authoritarian politicians, even when these politicians are seen by many as threats to the democratic order.

My curiosity isn’t merely intellectual. Around the world, these politicians are not just getting elected democratically; they are often retaining enough popular support after a term — or two or three — to get re-elected. Polls strongly suggest that Trump has a reasonable chance of winning another term in November.

Why Trump? Even if these voters were unhappy with President Biden, why not a less polarizing Republican, one without indictments and all that dictator talk? Why does Trump have so much enduring appeal?

“I have the business, let’s call them talents, and I think I’ll probably go the political route,”

He has been one of the most visible Trump supporters on Fox News and reportedly met privately with Trump for 90 minutes last week.

Haley has publicly criticized Trump; Capito has not. The latter has more than 14 years of experience on Capitol Hill and hails from an economically depressed state that’s been receptive to Trump’s populist message.

It is one of fate’s cruel jokes that conservatism should be at its modern nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith — if conservatism is defined as embracing limited government, displaying a rational, skeptical and moderate temperament and believing in the priority of the moral order.

All these principles are related, and under attack

Conservatives believe that human beings are fallible and prone to ambition, passion and selfishness