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One establishment Republican insider with fears about Mr. Trump’s continued influence on the party told me today that the fund-raising totals were far more worrisome to moderate Republicans than his outlandish statements on Saturday — which felt like old hat.

“What surprised people and took them aback was the $85 million he raised,” the person said in a phone interview. “That is a bigger problem, frankly, than what he says.

It bears noting that the first quarter of the year, running from January through March, included the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the fallout from Mr. Trump’s refusal to fully denounce the perpetrators.

Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster and strategist, said that this trend was only the latest example of how Mr. Trump has shifted the power in Republican politics away from major corporations and establishment figures, and toward the grass roots — a demographic he firmly controls.

Even as two-thirds of Americans said in a CNN poll last month that they disapproved of how Mr. Trump had responded to the Jan. 6 attack, 63 percent of Republicans said he had responded to it well.

Mr. Trump’s command over small-dollar donors in the Republican base is enormous — as is his popularity. Which means that the very National Republican Senatorial Committee that gave Mr. Trump an award on Monday is holding its breath ahead of 2022.

Last week, the Senate Leadership Fund — a super PAC that funds Senate Republican campaigns — announced that it would back Ms. Murkowski in her bid for re-election.

The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assume that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks. That makes it harder for them to show a deficit and qualify for an award

The awards so far have averaged $516,000 for the 379 players with early-stage dementia and $715,000 for the 207 players with moderate dementia. Retirees can also seek payouts for Alzheimer's disease and a few other diagnoses. The settlement ended thousands of lawsuits that accused the NFL of long hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and traumatic brain injury.

Until that law was passed, the fate of the refuge had depended on which political party controlled the White House and Congress. Republicans wanted to allow drilling, Democrats to keep the area off limits.

But Ms. Brisson said that even if the lawsuits were successful, they only concern the past activities of the Trump administration. A legal victory would not overturn the mandate in the 2017 law to hold two separate lease auctions, she said, “just the way it was carried out.”

Given that, there are questions as to how much interest a second sale would generate, especially since there was little interest in the first one. Twenty-two out of 32 tracts were offered in that sale, nearly 1.1 million acres in areas that were thought to have the greatest potential for oil development.

I could tell him about the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded Mr. Frank, a leader of the Nisqually tribe, during the Obama administration, or how his struggle led to a monumental 1974 federal court ruling on resource equality known as the Boldt decision, awarding his people 50 percent of the salmon in their waters.

If culture is an expression of our refined and uplifting impulses, he spread many ripples in the heritage of humanity. He’ll join Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Adams, Helen Keller as well as several other Native Americans in the Capitol not because it’s his turn. But because his life exemplifies the best values of a nation’s shared stories.

“The people need to know the truth,” he used to say, by way of explaining an 1854 treaty between the tribes of Puget Sound and the American government that guaranteed tribal fishing rights for eternity.

The same cannot be said of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, a man who was indicted on a charge of treason, and another traitor, his vice president, Alexander Stephens — both of whom are still in Statuary Hall, even after waging war on the United States. Mr. Stephens said the Confederacy was founded “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The outgoing statue of Mr. Whitman in buckskin and a Bible is a totem to the Big Lie that he saved the Oregon Country from the British, a founding myth of the Pacific Northwest. “It was the kind of lie that many Americans still love — simple, hero-driven, action-packed, ordained by God,” Mr. Harden told me. “Replacing Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. is sweet symbolic justice.”

But I also wanted to summon the spirit of the man I knew as just Billy — his guts, his wisdom, his unbroken big heartedness. “Being with Billy is like floating on a steady, easy river,” his wife Sue Crystal, who died of cancer in 2001, once said. “He’s the happiest person I know.”

But making fighting corruption a policy priority won’t be easy. It’s a topic that cuts across numerous fields and government agencies, requiring bureaucratic savvy to coordinate initiatives. And America’s own corruption issues — from concerns about the role money plays in U.S. politics to lingering questions about whether Trump profited off the presidency — could undercut its voice.

“Governments can’t keep ignoring those grievances,” said Abigail Bellows, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “No one country can deal with it alone. It’s something that countries need to work together on.

Biden has pledged to host an international “Summit for Democracy” in the coming months, and the need to fight corruption is expected to be a major theme during that gathering. Alongside the summit, Biden is expected to issue a presidential policy directive that establishes fighting corruption as a core national security interest, a promise he made in an essay laying out his foreign policy agenda during the 2020 presidential campaign.

In a recent “interim strategic guidance” document outlining basic principles of its future National Security Strategy, the Biden administration blamed corruption for an array of ills, arguing, for example, that, tax havens and illicit financing “contribute to income inequality, fund terrorism, and generate pernicious foreign influence.”

It’s critical that the administration not fall into longstanding U.S. habits of viewing corruption as simply a law enforcement issue or one that affects only developing or failed states, analysts and activists said.

“We are key enablers of the problem globally,” said Trevor Sutton, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. “You need to have a concerted strategy among democracies to deal with this issue.”

Among the Republicans who backed cracking down on anonymous shell companies was Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, one of the most hawkish voices in Congress. He warned that “criminals and terrorists are exploiting our financial system using shell companies that hide their identities.”

Activists say the Biden administration needs to beef up the staffing in certain government divisions if it wants its anti-corruption agenda to go beyond rhetoric and have a meaningful impact.

One hurdle facing the Biden administration as it pushes an anti-corruption agenda on the global front is America’s own perceived flaws, from longstanding concerns about “dark money” in U.S. politics to the machinations of the lobbying and influence industries.

Blinken recently launched the “International Anticorruption Champions Award” to recognize anti-corruption crusaders around the world. (Planning for the prize began during the Trump administration, a State Department spokesperson said.)

Zelensky, though, has his own links to Kolomoyskyy. The Ukrainian president is a former comedian who gained popularity in part because of coverage by a media outlet owned by the mogul.

The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement

His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.

the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.

Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s

Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi

“What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”

the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity

His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.

The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .

As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.

we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.

“Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”

it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.

As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.

The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied

Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.

ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.

He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment

If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary

He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 

It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”

Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.

But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.

To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect

Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.

Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)

Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar

Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this

He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers

When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.

But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it

He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.

On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.

To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.

In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.

their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing

It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.

Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become

The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will

it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.

All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,

In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern

It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces

The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one

In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”

. For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans

the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.

Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.

In a statement late Thursday, Mulvaney denied the quid pro quo he had previously defended as appropriate and normal.

he described why Trump had intervened over the summer to block nearly $400 million in aid Congress had appropriated for Ukraine.

The reference to the hacked Democratic National Committee’s email server elevated a Trump-backed conspiracy theory that Ukraine was involved in election interference in 2016, something U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly attributed to Russia.

Mulvaney first said the president blocked the aid because he was concerned about corruption in Ukraine and the lack of European support for the country.

In admitting that Trump had linked politics with his Ukraine policy, Mulvaney said that critics were simply overreacting.“I have news for everybody: Get over it,” he said. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

“If the White House was withholding aid in regards to the cooperation of any investigation at the Department of Justice, that is news to us,” a Justice Department official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to contradict the acting White House chief of staff.

Whipple said Mulvaney’s strategy has been to try to normalize Trump’s un­or­tho­dox behavior by making the “insane” seem commonplace.“Trump’s actions are not defendable so the response is ‘Let’s just act like this is normal,’ ” he said. “There’s nothing normal about it.”

Several State Department officials have told congressional investigators they objected to Trump’s push to give his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a central role in Ukraine policy.

In the one-month period between the Iowa caucuses and Super Tuesday, about 40% of the total number of delegates voting in the first round of the Democratic National Convention will have been selected. In comparison, in 2016 only about a quarter of the delegates were distributed during that same period. A few weeks later, by the end of March, nearly 70% of the delegates will have been chosen.

Which brings us to the final element that makes a brokered convention more likely this year than in the past: the rules change that the Democratic party made to how voting will work at the 2020 convention

The 2008 and 2016 DNC conventions weren't "brokered," though, because Democrats since 1984 have allowed a large number of unpledged or uncommitted delegates to attend and vote at the national convention. These so-called "superdelegates" -- and there were more than 700 of them in Philadelphia in 2016 -- are not bound by voting outcomes in any of the states. In fact, this large number of uncommitted superdelegates has made it difficult for Democratic candidates to obtain a majority of committed convention delegates without them.

The influence of the superdelegates over the years has led to cries of unfairness from candidates who were not awarded the nomination. Both Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016 could correctly argue that, had the superdelegates offered them support, they could have been the party's nominee.

The result was a change in the convention rules so that, in 2020, superdelegates will not participate in the first round of voting under this scenario. So it is up to Democratic primary and caucus participants to avoid a brokered convention.

A brokered convention in 2020 would set the stage for a repeat of that scenario. Already, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is saying that she will fight all the way to the convention. If Biden or Warren were to be handed the nomination by the superdelegates, and Gabbard were to win some delegates, might cries of "Bernie or Bust" on the convention floor be joined by "Tulsi or Trump"?

Invoking the 25th Amendment at the direction of the vice president and the cabinet, or impeaching Trump for a second time and holding a trial in the Senate.

The first of these seems unlikely to happen. It might require a broader deal -- if he were willing, Vice President Mike Pence could convince both Trump and the cabinet to remove the President in return for a full pardon from President Pence. It would be a risky move for Pence's future given the negative reception former President Gerald Ford received for pardoning Richard Nixon.

The House is likely to move on impeachment this week. The timing of sending the articles over to the Senate is where this gets interesting. The House can pass articles of impeachment quickly, but it is unlikely the Senate could pull off a trial before the President's term ended.

The bottom line is, while there are multiple options, it is still possible the President can run out the clock and once again avoid any legal responsibility for his actions. That's where the helplessness comes from for the majority of Americans. We've seen this movie before, and we don't like how it ends.

At a local club, make sure the pro knows they'll be no playing privileges. If he wants to play, he either has to own the course or join the hackers at the local public course. The PGA (who just announced the 2022 PGA Championship will not be played at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey) might offer him a deal -- privileges will be restored after a PGA official follows him for a year to record his real score and enter it into the handicap system.

We all buy books from the major publishers. Let them know you will no longer buy their books if they sign Trump to a book deal. Tell your local officials to stay away from Trump. No renaming of airports, highways or public buildings -- I might exclude toxic waste dumps and landfills from this list, however. If they don't listen, vote them out of office.

No awards or honors should be bestowed from your town, group or organization. No commencement speeches or honorary degrees from colleges and universities. In fact, following the example of Lehigh University, revoke a degree if it has already been awarded. If you are an author, make clear you won't work with publishers that do business with Trump.

If you work at a company, belong to an organization or trade association or an institution of higher education, let your bosses know that you won't tolerate paying Trump to come speak at events, conferences or any sort of engagement. Don't wait until he's booked, let them know in advance that he's not welcome. If you are a lecture agency and take Trump on as a client, understand that your other clients will go elsewhere for representation.

We can also pressure Congress to take further action. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires a former President be afforded the protection of the Secret Service. Also, nothing that says he deserves a million dollars a year for travel and a generous pension and healthcare plan. And of course, there should be no right to a state funeral.

Trump must be held accountable for crimes against the state.

Trump screwed up the most important job in the world -- president of the United States. Let's make sure he doesn't benefit now from the best job in the world -- former president of the United States. And for those who say this is cancel culture run amok, I say it's perfectly legal citizen justice well earned by Donald J Trump.

The U.S. government is lending its support to SMR development. In September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the first time issued a final safety evaluation report on a SMR—a critical step before a design can be approved—to NuScale

is developing its first commercial SMR for utilities in Utah and promising power by the end of the decade.

the Energy Department awarded $210 million to 10 projects to develop technologies for SMRs and beyond, as part of its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. The agency had already awarded $400 million to various projects since 2014 “to accelerate the development and deployment of SMRs,

. Potential buyers range from U.S. utilities trying to phase out coal-fired generators to Eastern European countries seeking energy independence.

GE’s second offering, a system now in development with nuclear startup TerraPower LLC, replaces water with molten salt, similar to what’s used in some advanced solar-power arrays. Dubbed Natrium, the system runs hotter than water-cooled reactors but at lower pressure and with passive cooling, which eliminates piping and electrical systems while improving safety, according to TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque.

“When you have a really elegant design, you can get multiple benefits working together,” Mr. Levesque says. TerraPower, established by investors including Bill Gates, received $80 million of the Energy Department funding for Natrium in October.

Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other advocacy groups argue that nuclear power remains a dangerous technological dead-end that causes as many problems as it solves.

Traditional reactors grew over time to achieve greater efficiencies of scale and lower cost per kilowatt-hour because power output rose faster than construction and operating costs. “There’s no reason that’s changed,” he says, dismissing SMR makers’ promises of lower costs and increased safety

Many proposed SMR expense reductions, such as less shielding, could ultimately increase their danger, while the combined use of several modules could create new safety risks like radioactive contamination that negate gains in individual modules, he says.

Mr. Ramana also says that the technological advances like 3-D printing and digital manufacturing that make SMRs possible are doing even more to improve green renewables. “It’s a kind of treadmill race, where one treadmill is going much faster.”

although SMRs have lower upfront capital cost per unit, their economic competitiveness is still to be proven.”

The document urged governments to adopt a range of policies, including:

Governments allocating one-third of their AI research and development funding, and companies one-third of their AI R&D resources, to safe and ethical use of systems.

Giving independent auditors access to AI laboratories.

Establishing a licensing system for building cutting-edge models.

AI companies must adopt specific safety measures if dangerous capabilities are found in their models.

Making tech companies liable for foreseeable and preventable harms from their AI systems.

Other co-authors of the document include Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three “godfathers of AI”, who won the ACM Turing award – the computer science equivalent of the Nobel prize – in 2018 for their work on AI.

Both are among the 100 guests invited to attend the summit. Hinton resigned from Google this year to sound a warning about what he called the “existential risk” posed by digital intelligence while Bengio, a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal, joined him and thousands of other experts in signing a letter in March calling for a moratorium in giant AI experiments.

The authors warned that carelessly developed AI systems threaten to “amplify social injustice, undermine our professions, erode social stability, enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society.”

They warned that current AI systems were already showing signs of worrying capabilities that point the way to the emergence of autonomous systems that can plan, pursue goals and “act in the world”. The GPT-4 AI model that powers the ChatGPT tool, which was developed by the US firm OpenAI, has been able to design and execute chemistry experiments, browse the web and use software tools including other AI models, the experts said.

“If we build highly advanced autonomous AI, we risk creating systems that autonomously pursue undesirable goals”, adding that “we may not be able to keep them in check”.

Other policy recommendations in the document include: mandatory reporting of incidents where models show alarming behaviour; putting in place measures to stop dangerous models from replicating themselves; and giving regulators the power to pause development of AI models showing dangerous behaviour

Some AI experts argue that fears about the existential threat to humans are overblown. The other co-winner of the 2018 Turing award alongside Bengio and Hinton, Yann LeCun, now chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and who is also attending the summit, told the Financial Times that the notion AI could exterminate humans was “preposterous”.

Nonetheless, the authors of the policy document have argued that if advanced autonomous AI systems did emerge now, the world would not know how to make them safe or conduct safety tests on them. “Even if we did, most countries lack the institutions to prevent misuse and uphold safe practices,” they added.

Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht.

Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Irelan

France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallie

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

“kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.

When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception

his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.

For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures

In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.

he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew

She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision

in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975

while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.

Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state

It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.

Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich

She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another

All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it

right now Germany’s resolution forbids it

This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth

The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.

the Republican Party and the conservative establishment is institutionally stronger than the Democratic Party, with an infrastructure that served as a bulwark through the 1960s and 70s

The right wing of the Republican Party has more disruptive potential than the left wing of the Democratic Party because it is more willing to go to extremes:

While, the rapid growth of well-financed and autonomous competitors threatens all existing power structures, the bulk of the costs are likely to fall on the Republican Party.

Republicans, in contrast to Democrats, prefer hierarchical, well-ordered organizations, and are much more willing to cede authority to those in power.

The Republican establishment has a full arsenal of weapons at its disposal, including endorsements, favored speaking engagements at key party gatherings, leverage over top consultants and a signaling process to show who has been anointed from on high.

The most powerful weapon of all was always the oversight exercised by party leaders over the flow of money to candidates

Unleashed by Citizens United, a handful of renegade billionaires made life miserable for Mitt Romney, the establishment candidate. More importantly, it only took four men — Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas and Macao casino mogul; Harold Simmons, a Dallas-based leveraged buyout specialist; Foster Friess, a conservative Christian and a successful investor; and William Dore, a Louisiana energy company C.E.O. – to stun traditional party power brokers during the first four months of 2012.

turned the primary process into an open contest, giving full voice to the more extreme wings dominated by the Tea Party and the evangelical right.

The newly empowered billionaires are positioned to challenge the Republican Party at its point of greatest vulnerability, during the primaries.

These new players, along with their super PACs, undermine the influence of the parties in another crucial way. Before Citizens United, the three major Republican Party committees exerted power because their financial preeminence gave them the final word on the award of contracts to pollsters, direct mail, voter contact, and media consultants – very few of whom were willing to alienate a key source of cash.

The ascendance of super PACs creates a separate and totally independent source of contracts for the community of political professionals. Super PACs and other independent groups already raise more than any of the political party committees and almost as much as either the Republican or Democratic Party committees raise in toto.

“Who is the Republican Party in the Citizens United age? If you had to point to the ‘Republican Party’ would you be more likely to point to Reince Preibus (and implicitly the R.N.C.) or Karl Rove (and Crossroads G.P.S.)? I think candidates might consider Rove more important.”

the diminishment of the parties means that the institutions with the single-minded goal of winning a majority will be weakened. When parties are influential, they can help keep some candidates and office holders from going off the ideological deep end. The emergence of independently financed super PACs give voice to those with the most extreme views.

If the parties are eviscerated, the political system could adjust itself and regain vitality. But I doubt it. For all their flaws, strong political parties are important to a healthy political system. The displacement of the parties by super rich men determined to flex their financial muscles is another giant step away from democracy.

When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, “We saw that as our entire job.”

I realize during our conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like “The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who create those shows

“I love Don DeLillo,” I answer.“Yeah,” Rhodes answers. “That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“I immediately understood that it’s a very important quality for a staffer,” Hamilton explained, “that he could come into a meeting and decide what was decided.” I suggested that the phrase “decide what was decided” is suggestive of the enormous power that might accrue to someone with Rhodes’s gifts. Hamilton nodded. “Absolutely,” he said.

Rhodes’s opinions were helpful in shaping the group’s conclusions — a scathing indictment of the policy makers responsible for invading Iraq. For Rhodes, who wrote much of the I.S.G. report, the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.

when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers

Obama relies on Rhodes for “an unvarnished take,” in part, she says, because “Ben just has no poker face,” and so it’s easy to see when he is feeling uncomfortable. “The president will be like, ‘Ben, something on your mind?’ And then Ben will have this incredibly precise lay-down of why the previous half-hour has been an utter waste of time, because there’s a structural flaw to the entire direction of the conversation.”

The literary character that Rhodes most closely resembles, Power volunteers, is Holden Caulfield. “He hates the idea of being phony, and he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.”

He became aware of two things at once: the weight of the issues that the president was confronted with, and the intense global interest in even the most mundane presidential communications.

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologie

As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about. “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

”This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time

Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why

, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was “free” and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter

Axelrod, a former newspaperman, sighed. “It’s not as easy as standing in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million people like past presidents have been able to do,” he said. The bully pulpit by and large doesn’t exist anymore, he explained. “So more and more, over the last couple of years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found,” he said. “I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the publi

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false

Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the administration’s foreign-policy aims and priorities converged on Iran. “We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,” he said. “We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”

If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.

we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.

The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making

During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”

I examine the president’s thoughts unfolding on the page, and the lawyerly, abstract nature of his writing process. “Moral imagination, spheres of identity, but also move beyond cheap lazy pronouncements,” one note reads. Here was the new American self — rational, moral, not self-indulgent. No longer one thing but multiple overlapping spheres or circles. Who is described here? As usual, the author is describing himself.

Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this

“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely

When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

Obama’s particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia. “Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.

The parts of Obama’s foreign policy that disturb some of his friends on the left, like drone strikes, Rhodes says, are a result of Obama’s particular kind of globalism, which understands the hard and at times absolute necessity of killing. Yet, at the same time, they are also ways of avoiding more deadly uses of force — a kind of low-body-count spin move

He shows me the president’s copy of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a revision of an original draft by Favreau and Rhodes whose defining tension was accepting a prize awarded before he had actually accomplished anything. In his longhand notes, Obama relocated the speech’s tension in the fact that he was accepting a peace prize a week after ordering 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. King and Gandhi were the author’s heroes, yet he couldn’t act as they did, because he runs a state. The reason that the author had to exercise power was because not everyone in the world is rational.

In Panetta’s telling, his own experience at the Pentagon under Obama sometimes resembled being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from the engine. Obama and his aides used political elders like him, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton as cover to end the Iraq war, and then decided to steer their own course, he suggests. While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about.

“Was it a point of connection between you and the president that you had each spent some substantial part of your childhoods living in another country?” I ask. Her face lights up.

“Absolutely,” she answers. The question is important to her. “The first conversation we had over dinner, when we first met, was about what it was like for both of us to live in countries that were predominantly Muslim countries at formative parts of our childhood and the perspective it gave us about the United States and how uniquely excellent it is,” she says. “We talked about what it was like to be children, and how we played with children who had totally different backgrounds than our own but you would find something in common.”

Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on

“He is a brilliant guy, but he has a real problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith,” one former senior official told me of the president. “He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book

Another official I spoke to put the same point more succinctly: “Clearly the world has disappointed him.

When I asked whether he believed that the Oval Office debate over Syria policy in 2012 — resulting in a decision not to support the uprising against Assad in any meaningful way — had been an honest and open one, he said that he had believed that it was, but has since changed his mind. “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,”

“In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.” The comparison is a startling one — and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world.

He understands the president’s pivot toward Iran as the logical result of a deeply held premise about the negative effects of use of American military force on a scale much larger than drone strikes or Special Forces raids. “I think the whole legacy that he was working on was, ‘I’m the guy who’s going to bring these wars to an end, and the last goddamn thing I need is to start another war,’ ” he explains of Obama. “If you ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.”

“The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.

“There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say ‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works. We’ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision

Perhaps the president and his aides were continually unable to predict the consequences of their actions in Syria, and made mistake after mistake, while imagining that it was going to come out right the next time

“Another read, which isn’t necessarily opposed to that,” I continue, “is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. But if they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms — ”Panetta completes my sentence: “ — they’d get the [expletive] kicked out of them.” He looks at me curiously. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “Did you present this theory to Ben Rhodes?

“Oh, God,” Rhodes says. “The reason the president has bucked a lot of establishment thinking is because he does not agree with establishment thinking. Not because I or Denis McDonough are sitting here.” He pushes back in his chair. “The complete lack of governance in huge swaths of the Middle East, that is the project of the American establishment,” he declares. “That as much as Iraq is what angered me.

Ben Rhodes wanted to do right, and maybe, when the arc of history lands, it will turn out that he did. At least, he tried. Something scared him, and made him feel as if the grown-ups in Washington didn’t know what they were talking about, and it’s hard to argue that he was wrong.

What has interested me most about watching him and his cohort in the White House over the past seven years, I tell him, is the evolution of their ability to get comfortable with tragedy. I am thinking specifically about Syria, I add, where more than 450,000 people have been slaughtered.

“Yeah, I admit very much to that reality,” he says. “There’s a numbing element to Syria in particular. But I will tell you this,” he continues. “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.

Iraq is his one-word answer to any and all criticism.

He mutters something about John Kerry, and then goes off the record, to suggest, in effect, that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.

Rhodes walks me out into the sunlight of the West Wing parking lot, where we are treated to the sight of the aged Henry Kissinger, who has come to pay a visit. I ask Rhodes if he has ever met the famous diplomat before, and he tells me about the time they were seated together at a state dinner for the president of China. It was an interesting encounter to imagine, between Kissinger, who made peace with Mao’s China while bombing Laos to bits, and Rhodes, who helped effect a similar diplomatic volte-face with Iran but kept the United States out of a civil war in Syria, which has caused more than four million people to become refugees. I ask Rhodes how it felt being seated next to the embodiment of American realpolitik. “It was surreal,” he says, looking off into the middle distance. “I told him I was going to Laos,” he continues. “He got a weird look in his eye.

He is not Henry Kissinger, or so his logic runs, even as the underlying realist suspicion — or contempt — for the idea of America as a moral actor is eerily similar. He is torn. As the president himself once asked, how are we supposed to weigh the tens of thousands who have died in Syria against the tens of thousands who have died in Congo? What power means is that the choice is yours, no matter who is telling the story.

Guam drew attention from both candidates, who ran radio advertisements in an effort to scoop up any possible delegates in the final stretch of primaries and caucuses.