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when the anti-war and other protest movements of the 1960s faded, so did their challenge to exceptionalist language. By the 1980s, Democrats were playing catch-up to Ronald Reagan’s flag-waving patriotism

During the Barack Obama years, questioning American exceptionalism was considered a career-imperiling transgression. When Republicans questioned his commitment to the creed, Obama in 2014 replied, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”

a resurgent left fueled by an influx of Millennial voters has launched a new challenge to exceptionalist discourse

Partly, it’s because a higher percentage of Millennials are people of color, who generally look more skeptically on America’s claims of moral innocence

Partly, it’s because the financial crisis has cast doubt on whether America’s economic model is preferable to those practiced in other nations. Younger Americans—a majority of whom embrace “socialism”—believe it’s not

Most of all, the challenge to exceptionalism is a response to Trump.

. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans over the age of 65 were 37 points more likely to say the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than that “there are other countries that are better than the U.S.”

Americans under 30 split in the opposite direction. By a margin of 16 points, they said some other countries were better.

While conservatives affirm America’s superiority by a margin of almost 10 to one, liberals reject it by more than two to one.

A few years ago, commentators rarely evoked the specter of American “authoritarianism.” Now it’s commonplace

With his embrace of foreign authoritarians and his cultivation of conservatism’s xenophobic and racist fringes, Trump has become a galvanizing figure for the left, which for the first time since the 1960s has begun regularly evoking the specter of American “fascism.

Fascism didn’t seem like an American problem. That’s no longer the case. Leftist street activists now embrace the term antifa, and the movement has grown dramatically under Trump.

they’re also reinterpreting the American past. New scholarship has, for instance, muddied the distinction between German Nazism and early-20th-century American white supremacy.

Adam Serwer excavated the work of World War I–era racial theorists such as Madison Grant to show that the “seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.”

This willingness to equate American white supremacy with the barbarism that occurs in other countries has also shaped the way the left describes terrorism.

Now it’s become common, not only among leftist commentators but among Democratic politicians, to apply the term to violence committed by native-born white Americans.

When remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II, Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.

They are challenging not only the physical and legal barriers that Trump is erecting against immigrants entering the United States, but also the conceptual barriers that American exceptionalism erects against seeing the United States as a nation capable of evil

The Guardian was able to unravel Nazzaro’s identity due to his 2018 activities in a remote corner of the Pacific north-west.

Last August, an Oregon-based antifascist group, Eugene Antifa, warned that the Base was planning a “hate camp” in the neighboring state of Washington, and claimed Nazzaro (operating under the alias of “Spear”) had purchased land in Stevens county for training purposes. This warning came after a leak of the Base’s internal chats.

Property record searches revealed that three 10-acre blocks of undeveloped land were purchased in December 2018 for $33,000 in the name of a Delaware LLC called “Base Global”. In a telephone conversation in late November, Manke confirmed that this was the block of land he had been referring to.

The location of the land is consistent with “Norman Spear’s” advocacy of a white supremacist strategy called the Northwest Territorial Imperative (NTI), which was promoted by the deceased white supremacist Harold Covington.

The strategy argues for the creation of a separatist ethnostate in the Pacific north-west and encourages white supremacists to move to the region.

The plan, he said, would trigger the relocation to the Pacific north-west of the white population in the United States.

Under the motto “there is no political solution”, the Base embraces an “accelerationist” ideology, which holds that acts of violence and terror are required in order to push liberal democracy towards collapse, preparing the way for white supremacists to seize power and institute an ethnostate.

Materials inspected and sources consulted by the Guardian indicate that Nazzaro, as “Spear”, has faced persistent suspicions from current and former members of the group that he is a “fed”, or the agent of a foreign government, or that the Base is a “honeypot” intended to lure neo-Nazis out into the open for the benefit of law enforcement agencies.

The Guardian has discovered that all of the business addresses associated with Nazzaro’s OSI LLCs are “virtual offices”. This describes a situation where a second company provides a business address, and sometimes meeting rooms and greeting services, for businesses who do not wish to maintain their own premises.

Actually, speech is not just interchangeable with violence; even silence is! One of the more popular signs at the rally in Boston a few weeks back was the following: “White Silence = Violence.” If you are not actively speaking out against white supremacy, in other words, you are actively enforcing it. Once you’ve apologized for being born white, and asked permission to speak, your next and only step is to inveigh against racism/sexism, etc. … or be accused of being a white supremacist yourself. At some point your head begins to explode. What is this: a Maoist boot camp?

We often discuss these things in the media without understanding the core ideas that animate them. But it’s important to understand that for the social-justice left, there is nothing irrational about any of this. If you take their ideas seriously, oppressive speech is violence and self-defense is legitimate. Violence is therefore not some regrettable incident. Violence to achieve liberation is a key part of the ideology they believe in.

The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.

Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.

Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.

we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.

Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.

in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts

most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature

The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves

But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.

in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.

The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.

Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.

The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.

we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.

The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP

When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences

There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.

Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.

And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.

61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.

When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.

By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.

among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.

the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.

George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.

Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight

And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.

In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization

And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.

In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.

But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.

Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all

It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?

In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.

The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?

if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?

Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken

But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.

As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.

I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered

I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.

we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was

But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.

Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.

The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.

All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.

“I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II

"They need somebody who's going to go as I will, as I'm committed to do, to defending President Trump's America First policies and also to protecting the people of Missouri from Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's radical leftist agenda," said Greitens of Missouri voters.

He spoke at the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally that led to the insurrection at the US Capitol. And even in the aftermath of that riot, Brooks insisted, without evidence that left wings groups like Antifa had been behind the riot.

Greitens, after all, resigned under pressure as governor following revelations of a 2015 affair with a woman who testified under oath to state lawmakers that she felt forced into sexual acts by him -- and that he had threatened to make public explicit photos of her unless she stayed silent about the affair. Greitens admitted the affair but denied the other allegations.

On Brooks' part, he has been perhaps the single most outspoken advocate of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Both Brooks and Greitens, by dint of their unstinting loyalty to Trump -- not to mention their high profiles in their states -- will likely start as the frontrunners for the respective Republican nominations in both states.

in order for Republicans to retake the Senate, they need to pick up at least one Democratic seat while not losing any one their own

The truth, I suspect, was simultaneously about as bad as I suspected, and paradoxically anticlimactic. Trump was surrounded by all sorts of odious characters who manipulated him into saying and doing things that ran against the national interest. One of those characters was Putin. In the end, their influence ran up against the limits that the character over whom they had gained influence was a weak, failed president.

Ultimately, whatever value Trump offered to Russia was compromised by his incompetence and limited ability to grasp firm control even of his own government’s foreign policy. It was not just the fabled “deep state” that undermined Trump. Even his own handpicked appointees constantly undermined him, especially on Russia. Whatever leverage Putin had was limited to a single individual, which meant there was nobody Trump could find to run the State Department, National Security Agency, and so on who shared his idiosyncratic Russophilia.

Mueller even testified that this arrangement gave Russia blackmail leverage over Trump. But by the time these facts had passed from the realm of the mysterious to the confirmed, they had become uninteresting.

Shvets told Unger that the KGB cultivated Trump as an American leader, and persuaded him to run his ad attacking American alliances. “The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations at that time,” he said, “It was a big thing — to have three major American newspapers publish KGB soundbites.”

To be clear, while Shvets is a credible source, his testimony isn’t dispositive. There are any number of possible motives for a former Soviet spy turned critic of Russia’s regime to manufacture an indictment of Trump

This is what intelligence experts mean when they describe Trump as a Russian “asset.” It’s not the same as being an agent. An asset is somebody who can be manipulated, as opposed to somebody who is consciously and secretly working on your behalf.

A second reason is that reporter Craig Unger got a former KGB spy to confirm on the record that Russian intelligence had been working Trump for decades. In his new book, “American Kompromat,” Unger interviewed Yuri Shvets, who told him that the KGB manipulated Trump with simple flattery. “In terms of his personality, the guy is not a complicated cookie,” he said, “his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

If I had to guess today, I’d put the odds higher, perhaps over 50 percent. One reason for my higher confidence is that Trump has continued to fuel suspicion by taking anomalously pro-Russian positions. He met with Putin in Helsinki, appearing strangely submissive, and spouted Putin’s propaganda on a number of topics including the ridiculous possibility of a joint Russian-American cybersecurity unit. (Russia, of course, committed the gravest cyber-hack in American history not long ago, making Trump’s idea even more self-defeating in retrospect than it was at the time.) He seemed to go out of his way to alienate American allies and blow up cooperation every time they met during his tenure.

He would either refuse to admit Russian wrongdoing — Trump refused even to concede that the regime poisoned Alexei Navalny — or repeat bizarre snippets of Russian propaganda: NATO was a bad deal for America because Montenegro might launch an attack on Russia; the Soviets had to invade Afghanistan in the 1970s to defend against terrorism. These weren’t talking points he would pick up in his normal routine of watching Fox News and calling Republican sycophants.

there was a reasonable chance — I loosely pegged it at 10 or 20 percent — that the Soviets had planted some of these thoughts, which he had never expressed before the trip, in his head.

Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)

In 2018, I became either famous or notorious — depending on your point of view — for writing a story speculating that Russia had secret leverage over Trump

Here is what I wrote in that controversial section:

“They were the ones that floated March 4,” she said. “They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s a false flag. It’s not QAnon that’s going to do anything on March 4. It’s a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.’”

“And it’s a community in which there’s an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, ‘Yes, and’ — not, ‘No, but,’” Kleinfeld said. “If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability.”

While fully embracing QAnon talking points remains a minority position within the GOP, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election has become the mainstream position inside the party.Read More

Beyond partisanship, belief in QAnon conspiracy theories is also strongly associated with consumption of far-right media, the report finds.

Republicans also say, 54% to 30%, that they agree with the myth that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol "was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad."

In a new Quinnipiac survey, 74% of Republicans say that "too much is being made of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and it is time to move on," compared with just 18% who say that it was an "attack on democracy that should never be forgotten."

A 64% majority of registered voters, including similar shares in both parties, think that political divisions pose a major threat to the United States, per a new Fox News poll.

“He is an excellent questioner, and an important voice on the court,” said Gregory G. Garre, a lawyer with Latham & Watkins who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

Over the course of the last term, Justice Thomas mused about the ballooning salaries of college football coaches, said a police officer’s supposed “hot pursuit” struck him as a “meandering pursuit,” commented on the “sordid roots” of a Louisiana law enacted to advance white supremacy and wondered how public schools should address students’ comments “about current controversies, like protests or Black Lives Matter, antifa or Proud Boys.”

If Justice Thomas’s questions differed from those of his colleagues, it was in their courtesy. He almost never interrupted lawyers, though he asked pointed follow-up questions if there was time left.

Mr. Garre said Justice Thomas’s questions at the court’s first phone argument, over whether Booking.com could trademark its name, refocused the court with a smart analogy. The justice asked how an internet domain name differed from a 1-800 phone number, noting that 1-800-PLUMBING is a registered trademark.Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer pursued the point, and Booking.com prevailed, in Justice Ginsburg’s last majority opinion.

“I think it’s unnecessary in deciding cases to ask that many questions, and I don’t think it’s helpful,” he said at Harvard Law School in 2013. “I think we should listen to lawyers who are arguing their cases, and I think we should allow the advocates to advocate.”

When he did speak from the bench, the effect could be electrifying. In 2002, for instance, the courtroom was riveted when he shared his reflections on the meaning of a Virginia law that banned cross burning, recalling “almost 100 years of lynching” in the South by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups.

The justices hope to return to the courtroom when the new term starts in October. Once he is back on the bench, will Justice Thomas revert to his usual taciturnity?

But it’s also fair to say that Justice Thomas may well prefer the orderly questioning of the current format as opposed to the feeding frenzy that can dominate when the justices are on the bench together.”

In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals.

“Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?,” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:

The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.

A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists.

What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.

“What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”

For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.

Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).

those who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.

The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

"When I looked at this weirdo who was dressed as a Viking, I was like, 'Does he know what he's doing?'" Frantz tells NBC THINK about Angeli. "Is he aware of this tradition, or is it a coincidence? Or is it not just a coincidence and he's not aware, but it's something which travels through our culture in the background? Maybe he doesn't even know what he's doing, but he's doing exactly what he would have done in the 19th century."

"Comic frames are very helpful, because it gave people a way to deny what was really happening," she says. She cites using Pepe the Frog as an example of how that tactic is still used today. "The comic deniability of populist movements,"

Abe Rutchick, a professor of psychology at California State University, Northridge, explains that dressing in costume can affect how we act. "If we're dressing in costume, we're clearly trying to evoke a role or a character. It can influence people's self-perception and behavior,"

The fact that many of the outfits from the Capitol look comical is, historically, also not a coincidence. "Adopting this carnivalesque posture, they can actually say: 'We're not really hurting them. They're just afraid because they're fearful,'"

But whether or not the "Q Shaman" knew exactly whom he was channeling when he put on his horns and fur, putting on the outfit is likely to have influenced his behavior.

Take, for instance, the lunacy of a man waving for the camera as he walks off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lectern. How could he be doing something wrong — he looks so emboldened and silly? Or the brazenness of wearing your employee ID badge to the revolution.

Rutchick explains that the purpose of wearing uniforms, insignias, tattoos or symbols that show allegiance is twofold; they create a sense of in-group camaraderie and a sense of out-group distance.

Members of the far-right Proud Boys — whom Trump famously told to "stand back, and stand by" during his 2020 campaign — were at the Capitol in large numbers, and they were characteristically organized. The group, which usually dresses in yellow and black — often in the form of a Fred Perry polo shirt — told members to dress all in black this time, as if they were part of the anti-fascist movement known as antifa.

"Historically and practically, such a request is not necessarily a prerequisite to the President using regular federal troops for domestic law enforcement," Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor and CNN contributor, previously told CNN of the law.

The Insurrection Act hasn't been invoked since 1992 during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black man, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Congress amended the law after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 to give more clarity about its use during natural disasters, but dropped some of those changes a year later after objections by state governors who did not want to cede their authority.

Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act when he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and then sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to integrate the schools.

While he's never invoked the law, the President did threaten to use it last year.Following the police killing of George Floyd in May, Trump touted the Insurrection Act as a way to break up anti-fascists, or Antifa, who he said were organizing violent riots that led to looting."If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them," Trump said at the time, though he never did.

Few people have had such durability with the president, and few have been so willing to say and do things for him that others will not.

“I don’t mind being shut down for my craziness,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Giuliani, according to Alexander Panetta, a reporter for CBC News who listened to the podcast before it was removed. “I’m not going to be shut down for yours.”

In return, Mr. Giuliani, who failed at his own bid for the presidency in 2008, got to hang out with the president in the Oval Office and used his new connections to pursue lucrative contracts.

Mr. Giuliani stepped into the president’s legal affairs in April 2018. His eagerness to attack Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, impressed Mr. Trump, who was constantly making changes to his legal team. Most Trump advisers came to see Mr. Giuliani’s efforts with Mr. Mueller as a success.

Mr. Giuliani’s own legal problems have mounted alongside those of the president. As Mr. Giuliani pursued separate business opportunities in Ukraine, intelligence agencies warned that he could have been used by Russian intelligence officers seeking to spread disinformation about the election — reports that Mr. Trump shrugged off. Mr. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine continues to be a matter of interest in a continuing investigation by federal prosecutors in New York.

In a 37-minute video published Wednesday evening, Mr. Giuliani tried to rewrite the history of the Capitol riot. Although Mr. Trump incited his supporters to march to the building and “show strength,” Mr. Giuliani suggested in the video that antifa activists had been involved, a repeatedly debunked theory that has proliferated in pro-Trump circles online.“The rally ended up to some extent being used as a fulcrum in order to create something else totally different that the president had nothing to do with,” Mr. Giuliani said.

“He’s not alone,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump Organization consultant, said of the president. “He’s abandoned. Rudy’s just the last in a whole group of people.”

Some Republicans said Mr. McCarthy, the son of an assistant chief with the Bakersfield Fire Department, has done too much for conservative voters in the region for them to abandon him. They believe his delicate navigation of the events in Washington in recent days — speaking out against impeachment but saying the president bears responsibility for the attack on Congress by rioters — would not hurt him significantly in his district as he eyes becoming speaker of the House in two years.

“You’re going to have some Republicans who like Trump so much that this is going to be a deal breaker for them,” Mr. Campbell said, referring to Mr. McCarthy’s support of censure and assertion that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. “I don’t think that’s a majority. You’re also going to have other Republicans who feel that McCarthy has been our leader for so long, and he’s never let us down, and they’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

But since the rioting and impeachment, Mr. McCarthy is also facing attacks from the right. Many conservatives in Bakersfield said they believe the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that the president did not incite the mob attack. Mr. McCarthy’s remarks pinning the blame on Mr. Trump for the attack and batting down false suggestions that antifa was behind the riot shocked and angered many Republicans.

At the very least, the emergence of a “Trump-made-me-do-it” defense could serve to undercut the baseless narrative by some of the president’s congressional allies and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who have sought to push the story that outside agitators or disloyal servants were responsible for the Capitol attack.

Mr. Trump began promoting his Washington event well before it happened, urging his allies to join him for a speech outside the White House. During the address, attended by thousands, he told the crowd “to walk down to the Capitol” where Congress, overseen by Mr. Pence, was certifying the final count of the election results.

When Jennifer L. Ryan flew from Texas to Washington on a private plane with friends, she did so, as she later told a reporter, because Mr. Trump “asked us to go.”“He said, ‘Be there,’” Ms. Ryan explained. “So I went and I answered the call of my president.”

Mr. Watkins did not deny that Mr. Chansley was inside the Capitol that day, but suggested he had gone there because he, like others, “hung on the words of the president” for comfort and guidance. “What you’ve got here are people like my client who take the president seriously,” Mr. Watkins added, “and look to him to make them feel relevant in a system that has made them feel neglected.”

After Perón lost power, Peronism became a myth of a lost golden age—a fantasy of restoration and redemption—and always a rejection of the frustrations of normal politics, of the tedium of legality. Who needed policies when the solution to every problem was a magic name? Politicians who hoped for the old leader’s blessing trudged to his place of exile, were photographed with him, and then sabotaged by him. The only plan he followed was somehow to force himself again upon his country, one way or another.

We’re past the point of pretending it was antifa that did January 6, past the point of pretending that Trump didn’t want what he fomented and what he got. In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.

Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.

if Mr. Murdoch ever feels the need to distance himself more formally from Mr. Trump, he has other platforms on which to do so. In November, another Murdoch organ, The New York Post, proclaimed Mr. Biden’s victory in a cheery front page. After this week’s Capitol riots, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal made a case for Mr. Trump to resign.

Starting a new network requires approval from cable distributors like Charter Communications and Comcast (which Mr. Trump has gleefully denounced as “Concast”), corporations that could face intense public pressure not to associate with Mr. Trump after his presidency.

Mr. Klein pointed out that Comcast and other cable distributors carry Newsmax and One America News “despite the fictions they’ve been perpetrating.” He added, regretfully, that the violent events at the Capitol could even function as a launchpad for a niche media outlet catering to an audience eager to hear more from Mr. Trump.

“He might have thought of it,” Mr. Klein said, “as his greatest kickoff event.”

“Always look where I am,” a man coached a young girl in coveralls, telling her to stay close as they held hands and wove through the Omaha crowd waiting for Mr. Trump. “But these are Trump supporters. You don’t have to worry.”

It’s what made the phone call Mr. Rempel received about two weeks ago from fire officials as he and his wife were readying their children for school all the more shocking. His farm equipment was in flames. The combine, a tractor and two semitrailer trucks parked in a corn field south of town apparently had been set on fire

“I said, ‘No, that’s not possible,’” Mr. Rempel, a fourth-generation farmer, recalled, describing his disbelief that his equipment had been destroyed and his corn harvest put in jeopardy.

Though it is unclear how the fire started, the news about it startled a community that believes it shares a common value system. The fact that one vehicle was outfitted with Trump flags has led some residents and some of the more than 1,700 people who commented on Mr. Rempel’s Facebook post about the blaze to declare the fire politically motivated.

For his part, Mr. Rempel refuses to speculate about a motive, but here in Henderson, a certain fear is being whispered: The fire-starters are aligned with antifa, coming from the cities to attack their way of life.

Like most other states, Nebraska is cleaved by an urban-rural divide. Mr. Trump won overwhelming support from the state as a whole. But people in Nebraska’s two major cities tend to vote more liberally than those in rural areas. Mr. Trump won in Omaha’s Second Congressional District in 2016, but Barack Obama won in 2008. The district’s winner picks up a single electoral vote in a state that, unlike most others, splits its votes, which could play a pivotal role in a close election.

Ms. Goossen and other supporters of Mr. Trump speak with reverence about the president’s plain talk, how he isn’t a typical pontificating politician, how he, a real estate mogul from New York City, can relate to all strata of society.

The president has been on job sites and spoken to workers “hauling drywall and raising steel,” said Blake Collingsworth, who runs a home-building business in Lincoln.

“I love being in flyover country. I love it. I embrace it,” Mr. Rempel said, walking through his rows of corn and fretting over every bent stalk. “I lived in Omaha. Nobody knew who you were. You could do whatever you wanted. You could go steal a car and run into a post and run away and nobody cares.”