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“The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden.

And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.

"And then you break into it, you might have some berries down here, but this will be empty. There is no wheat inside the wheat head."

Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.

On her ranch, Berg says she's also worried about 1,000 acres of native grass seeds she has to plant this year into dry soil for a government conservation program. She says with all the Western wildfires in recent years, the wild grass and forage seeds have become expensive. She hates to plant them in shallow, bone-dry soil only to lose the crop if there's not sufficient rain.

The Berg's aren't the only ones suffering. The region is parched from near the Canadian border clear to the edge of Nevada, with triple digit temps on the way making it worse.

Earlier this year, Oregon declared drought zones for eight counties, and six more have requested it since. Now the drought is rapidly expanding into usually cooler and wetter western Oregon, according to Ryan Andrews, a hydrologist for the state's Water Resources Department. He says the thirsty ground will absorb whatever rain comes, meaning streams and rivers will get little water.

Jeff Marti, a drought expert for Washington's Department of Ecology, says it hasn't been this dry since the 1920s.

"It's the story of the irrigation haves and the have nots," he says. "Meaning those folks who get their water from rivers or storage, are probably going to be fine for their irrigation needs. But the dryland users and the folks that have cattle that depend on forage on the rangelands may be more challenged."

Looking ahead, Marti says the warming climate may mean more rain for the Northwest, but also much less snowpack that melts sooner. That could stress water supplies even more.

A bit west of Alderdale, Washington, cattle rancher Gary Hess is also having a hard time with the drought. His grass-fattened mother cows bawl at their calves, wanting them to stay close and away from the cattle dog. But he only has enough irrigated pasture for a small part of his herd, the rest are on dryland range. So Hess recently sold 70 mother cows with calves at their sides to another operator in Wyoming. They had many more good calves in them, and he hated to see them go. But he has no dryland grass to keep them.

"When you have to sell younger cows, that's a disappointment," Hess says as he tears up a bit. "With the kind of weather we've had the last couple of years, and the drought and the lack of feed and lack of water, we just finally had to cut back."

This spring it's also been windy here, further drying out the landscape like a blow dryer. Hess is thinking he'll have to sell more cows soon just to survive. He says it's hard to lose animals and bloodlines that he's worked so hard to build up. He figures it could take him up to a decade to build his herd back up without going into debt.

Most ranchers say they don't have time to dwell on the trucked-off cattle or lost crops. They're busy applying for federal disaster aid. And they're also keeping an eye out for wildfires that are always top-of-mind in the dry, hot summer, but expected to be worse because of this year's terrible drought.

He is concerned about the rise of autocrats around the world but pays special attention to China these days.

“He’s deadly earnest on becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world,” Biden said of Chinese President Xi Jinping during his address to Congress on Wednesday, departing from his prepared remarks. “He and others – autocrats – think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”

“A big part of it is looking out at Xi Jinping’s China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the pitch that they are making more overtly now than ever before … that the autocratic model, the non-democratic model is a better model for actually solving problems,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN. “And Joe Biden in his bones believes they are wrong.”

“Things are changing so rapidly in the world in science and technology and a whole range of other issues that – the question is: In a democracy that’s such a genius as ours, can you get the consensus in the timeframe that can compete with autocracy?” Biden told TV anchors on Wednesday ahead of his congressional address. “Xi does not believe we can. That’s what he’s betting on.” It’s one of the reasons why aides say Biden prioritized passing the safety net expansion included in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and tackling a sweeping infrastructure bill, rather than thornier progressive policies like immigration reform and gun control. And in turn, Biden has used this clarion call as a central part of his pitch for the sweeping set of government investments and programs topping his agenda, namely his $4 trillion, two-pronged package that contains proposed investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, education and child care.

A senior White House official, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, said Biden’s perspective on the rise of autocracies and the threat to democracy was “magnified by seeing some of those same characteristics reflected in the American president (Trump) and the American government for the last four years.”

Sitting in the Oval Office in early February, surrounded by his foreign policy team, Biden was mulling what kind of message he wanted to deliver at his first Group of 7 summit, when he craned his neck and pointed up at the hulking portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt adorning the wall behind him.

Just as Roosevelt led the US through a pivotal decade in which democracy was threatened, Biden told his aides he believed the US was at a similar inflection point. With autocracies like China on the rise, the US – and by extension his presidency – would be judged, at least in part, on the ability to answer a fundamental question: Can the US demonstrate that democracy works?

On the domestic front, Biden’s views on that inflection point also informed decisions as he and his team of senior advisers began crafting his legislative priorities early in his presidency.

Still, even with language aimed at appealing to Republicans who have harped on the threat that China represents, Biden does not appear any closer to getting the 10 Republicans he would need to pass the infrastructure package he proposed without using the partisan budget reconciliation proces

For now, Biden’s main argument is his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill and his handling of the pandemic, marked by a steady increase in vaccines and a return to a science-based approach. Officials said they hope those demonstrations of competence will reflect well on the US’s image abroad.

“The power of America’s example is a power to influence the choices of other countries, whether they’re going to be transparent, respect human rights and deliver good governance to their citizens or go the route of a China or Russia. That comes down in part to America showing the world that its model can effectively deliver for its citizens,” Sullivan said. “He believes a world in which there are more like-minded capable democracies is a world that is more hospitable to American interests and values.”

Five years ago, researchers with the Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., designed a robot that could automatically suture the intestines of a pig during surgery.

Surgical robots are equipped with cameras that record three-dimensional video of each operation. The video streams into a viewfinder that surgeons peer into while guiding the operation, watching from the robot’s point of view.

But this process came with its own asterisk. When the system told the robot where to move, the robot often missed the spot by millimeters. Over months and years of use, the many metal cables inside the robot’s twin arms have stretched and bent in small ways, so its movements were not as precise as they needed to be.

The objects and structural remnants on display in the museum paint a vivid picture of wealth, power and opulence. Among the stunning examples of ancient Roman artistry are elaborate mosaics and frescoes, a marble staircase, capitals of colored marble and limestone, and an imperial guard’s bronze brooch inset with gold and mother-of-pearl. “All the most refined objects and art produced in the Imperial Age turned up,” Dr. Serlorenzi said.

“The frescoes are incredibly ornate and of a very high decorative standard,”

“Given the descriptions of Caligula’s licentious lifestyle and appetite for luxury, we might have expected the designs to be quite gauche.”

Evidence suggests that after Caligula’s violent death — he was hacked to bits by his bodyguards — the house and garden survived at least until the Severan dynasty, which ruled from A.D. 193 to 235. By the fourth century, the gardens had apparently fallen into desuetude, and statuary in the abandoned pavilions was broken into pieces to build the foundations of a series of spas. The statues were not discovered until 1874, three years after Rome was made the capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy.

The latest excavation of the horti unfolded under the detritus of the residences, which had been evacuated in the 1970s in the wake of a building collapse.

I doubt these new discoveries will do much to rehabilitate his character. But they should open up new vistas onto his world, and reveal it to be every bit as paradisiacal as he desired it to be.”

The double-edged long sword was the main weapon of the Gauls,

The Long Sword

The axe was one of the many barbarian weapons that carried over into the medieval world.

Julius Caesar became the first Roman general to encounter the war chariots of the native Celtic tribes.

chainmail, which may have been invented in Europe by the Gallic Celts in the third century B.C. Most Gallic mail took the form of a short-sleeved shirt or vest made from an interlocking mesh of small metal rings. This provided flexibility while also protecting the wearer from slashing blows by swords and daggers,

Chainmail was extremely labor intensive to make—a single vest might include tens of thousands of rings

The Celtic Chariot

Chainmail

. The Falcata

When the Romans invaded modern day Spain in 218 B.C., they came face to face with a barbarian tribe known as the Celtiberians. These warriors were renowned both for their guerilla fighting ability and their skill as sword-smiths and metalworkers.

“falcata,” a curved, two-foot-long steel sword that was single-edged near the hilt and double-edged near the point. The weapon was weighted towards the tip, which allowed it to slash or stab its way through armor with relative ease.

The Recurve Bow

Attila and his Hun steppe marauders invaded Europe from the East and cut a bloody swath across the Roman Empire

Most Hun warriors carried composite bows assembled from wood, sinew, horn and bone. Unlike the Western bow, these steppe weapons were made to curve back on themselves at the ends, which generated added torque and made arrows fly with enough velocity to penetrate armor at 100 yards

Siege Towers and Battering Rams

Unlike most barbarian groups, the Huns were particularly proficient at siege warfare.

Huns used massive, wheeled siege towers to move protected archers close to the battlements and rain arrows onto the city’s defenders. They also pummeled the city’s walls with huge battering rams, which Priscus described as “a beam with a sharp metal point suspended on chains hung loosely from a V-shaped timber frame.”

The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat

the Neanderthals (400,000 to 40,000 years ago), who developed more sophisticated technology.

It also spanned most of the existence of Homo sapiens, dating from the first anatomically modern humans 200,000 years ago, to the transition to permanent agricultural communities around 10,000 B.C.

sharpened stones were used for cutting before hand-axes were developed, marking the onset of Acheulean technology about 1.6 million years ago.

Use of hearths dates back almost 800,000 years ago, and other findings point to controlled heating as far back as 1 million years ago.

By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as burying their dead and creating ornamental objects

These more specialized tools enabled them to widen their diet and create more effective clothing and shelter as they moved about in search of food.

From their earliest days, the hunter-gatherer diet included various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds and nuts. Lacking the means to kill larger animals, they procured meat from smaller game or through scavenging.

Modern humans were cooking shellfish by 160,000 years ago, and by 90,000 years ago they were developing the specialized fishing tools that enabled them to haul in larger aquatic life.

With limited resources, these groups were egalitarian by nature, scraping up enough food to survive and fashioning basic shelter for all.

Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.

Fire enabled hunter-gatherers to stay warm in colder temperatures, cook their food (preventing some diseases caused by consumption of raw foods like meat), and scare wild animals that might otherwise take their food or attack their camps.

By 50,000 years ago, huts made from wood, rock and bone were becoming more common,

Modern-day hunter-gatherers endure in various pockets around the globe. Among the more famous groups are the San, a.k.a. the Bushmen, of southern Africa,

The vast Mongolian landscape, whether it be plains, deserts or mountains, is dotted with man-made stone mounds marking the burials of ancient peoples.

The looting of archaeological sites in Mongolia has been happening for a very long time. Regional archaeologists have shared anecdotes of finding skeletons with break-in tools made from deer antlers in shafts of 2,000 year old royal tombs in central Mongolia.

For the untrained looter, any rock feature has the potential to contain valuable goods and so grave after grave is torn apart. Many of these will contain no more than human and animal bones.

Archaeologists’ interest in these burials lie in the information they contain for research, but this is worthless on the black antiquities market.

Each and every one of them had been completely destroyed by looters looking for treasure. Human remains and miscellaneous artefacts such as bows, arrows, quivers, and clothing were left scattered on the surface.

This is not to mention the loss of whatever goods (gold, silver, gems) the looters decided was valuable enough to keep.

Archaeological teams are currently working against climate change, looters, and each other for the chance to unearth rare mummies in the region that are known to pique public interest within Mongolia and abroad.

Others are ice mummies, interred in burials that were constructed in such a way that water seeped in and froze—creating a unique preservation environment.

Efforts to provide training opportunities, international collaborations with mummy experts, and improved infrastructure and facilities are underway, but these collections are so fragile there is little time to spare.

The situation in Mongolia could help us to understand and find new solutions to dealing with changes in climate and the economic drivers behind looting

There’s truth represented by a material record of the “things” left by ancient peoples and in Mongolia, the study of this record has led to an understanding of the impact of early food production and horse domestication, the emergence of new social and political structures and the dominance of a nomadic empire.

Not all the protests are driven by economic complaints, but widening gulfs between the haves and have-nots are radicalising many young people in particular.

Oxfam said in January that the world’s 26 richest individuals owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population.

The internet is not a determining factor – there was no social media in the 1960s – but is clearly important. Social media and the explosion of access to information is reordering hierarchies of knowledge and communication. Authorities can fight back with extensive surveillance regimes or with digital blackouts of the kind India recently imposed in disputed Kashmir, but 20th-century power structures are under enormous pressure, analysts say.

The proliferation of protests is no guarantee that things will change.

It is also easier, in a digital, globalised world, to know how the other half (or the 1%) live.

“The traditional system of enforcing power from top to bottom is increasingly being challenged,” says Thierry de Montbrial, of the French Institute of International Relations. “There is a social revolution with a growing demand for participatory democracy.”

“The problem is what to do after the protests, how to make your point and achieve the goals you’re protesting for. That proves to be the most difficult part.”

Protests and revolutions are defined by idealised slogans, he says, but systematic change is harder work. “You can break off part of a system, but it’s very hard to break the whole structure, which is formed of institutions and networks that are difficult to break.”

The leadership question is central and that is the thing we haven’t figured out yet: how do we actually find leadership in these inchoate displays of anger?

"My dad, Andre and couple of uncles and relatives went to check up on the vehicle. All they found was charred remains, ash and bones," Kendra Lee Miller said.

13-year-old Devin Blake Langford hid his six surviving siblings in bushes, covering them with branches, Kendra Lee Miller said in the post. He then walked 14 miles to the La Mora community and delivered the news of the attack, Kendra Lee Miller said.

he sixth child, Devin's 9-year-old sister, went missing after she left in a second attempt to get help.

Her daughter, however, was found alive and uninjured in the car with bullet holes all around her. Witnesses said they found her in her car seat, and it looked like she was moved to the floor by her mother for protection, Kendra Lee Miller said.

What is most galling about this economy is that we are supposed to proffer compliance and complicity as companies profit amorally off of us. Facebook unveils supposedly robust privacy protections on the same day it launches a service to connect you with your “secret crush.”

You’re supposed to pay whatever rent landlords want, whatever bills hospitals charge, whatever price surge the car-share makes up.

From Apple to John Deere, digital-rights-management technology has made us “tenants on our own devices.” The terms of service turn us into the servants. And what recourse do we have? We ask to speak with the manager, vent to Yelp, endure the hold muzak and hack our way to rival bargains. But let’s be honest: We don’t have power.

“How can you treat us like this? Do you think that this is normal?” Hundreds in the line broke into applause. At no point in those 12 hours did a United employee walk up and down the line to see how we were doing, offer blankets or water, or get our customer service session started early, the way they do in long lines at, say, Starbucks.

“What you need to do,” Benilda said, “is buy a new ticket. Because now you’ll just be on standby for the next flight and the next. That could last for days.”

For those of us living hand-to-mouth — which is to say, most of us — it takes years of nothing going wrong to earn your way out of poverty. I had gone wrong: I had slept, awaking back at square one

Maybe a few of us were in dire straits because we were confused or uninformed or lazy or irresponsible, a common argument about why people remain poor. But not all of us. Besides, personal fortitude is no match for structural inequalities.

Fifty-three hours after arriving at the airport in Newark, I landed in San Francisco; I’d scored a standby seat. My trip took almost triple the time it would have in 1933, when the transcontinental Boeing 247 debuted. Driving across the country would have been nine hours faster.

What is strangest and saddest about the broad brokenness of America is that, actually, this is the way it works. Have-not consumers pay to be complicit in our own fleecing. That is the toxic marrow in America’s bones. More than a century after conquering the onetime impossibility of flight, we have yet to master the long-time impossibility of fairness.

Trump is fond of talking about “my military”, but the claim is less true with every passing month. Veterans still support him in significantly greater numbers than the general population, but he no longer has a lead among active duty service members, who are fairly evenly split between approval and disapproval.

“By intervening, Trump is creating circumstances where the men and women in uniform are being asked to take sides between the superior officers and the president,” Mulligan said. “It makes you wonder: is nothing sacred? Sadly, the answer is no.”

it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it.

In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”

He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo

Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition

Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are

Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”

When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.

Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”

The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners

Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.

They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,”

The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company

Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool

The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.

Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers,

Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.

“With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”

Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.

Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party

One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.

Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.

Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them.

Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see.

After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”

“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”

But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin

Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.

We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”

“I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.

Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name

Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.

The finding led to controversy over whether the skeleton was really a warrior, with scholars and pundits protesting what they called revisionist history.

But in 2016 archaeologists conducted a fresh examination of the grave. The two central figures, it turned out, were a male and a female; they were surrounded by other male-female pairs. Thomas Emerson, who conducted the study with colleagues from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois, alongside scientists from other institutions, said the Cahokia discovery demonstrated the existence of male and female nobility. “We don’t have a system in which males are these dominant figures and females are playing bit parts,” as he put it.

There was inequality, but it wasn’t absolute, and there were a lot of shifts over time. When it comes to female power, and gender roles, the past was as ambiguous as the present.

Too often, the victories we have won have proved to be ephemeral or incomplete, and our full acceptance as Americans has once again been denied.

Mr. Trump is too late. We are everywhere in America. We are in the bone and the blood and the root of the country. We are not going anywhere, certainly not to some fantasy of a new “separate but equal” segregation, we in “our” cities, white people in “their” suburbs.

Perhaps the president is confused by how the Rev. Dr. King Martin Luther King Jr., in his greatest speech, referred to the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a “promissory note to which every American is to fall heir.” Perhaps that gave Mr. Trump the idea that this was all about money.

He quoted the most fundamental promise of the Declaration, that all of us have “certain unalienable Rights” — among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It seems strange that we must still agitate for these basic rights, or that Mr. Trump thinks he is being magnanimous when he offers them to us again as last-minute campaign promises — so long as we stay in our place.

for all the bitter lessons we have learned from Mr. Trump’s term in office, I can tell you that the wheel is turning again. That we have never had so many white allies, willing to stand together for freedom, for honor, for a justice that will free us all in the end, even those who are now most fearful and seething with denial.

e have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.

Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes

Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.

Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children

We may mention “race,” referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live

in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.

Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being

“The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”

Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States

While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.

Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential.

he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life.

One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power

over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to

Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified” as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs?

With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism

Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two

Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you

What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.

For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense

Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.

Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.

Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives

The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.

as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols.

The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.

The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas — the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus — including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians — who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.

African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants — domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.

the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.”

So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”

“Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, “Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality.” “He was caught in an illusion.”

The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”

“The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.

She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.

A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”

She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”

Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans.

Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.”

What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”

.She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?

As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand. It takes resolve and a strong stomach to stare at the particulars, rather than the generalities, of lives under slavery and Jim Crow and recent American experience

Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word “racism,” yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.

In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will.

I thought often of a pair of sentences from Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad.” “The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map,” he wrote. “You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it for yourself.”

In her novel “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggested that “maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute.”

“Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history

“The kids are completely aligned with this complete distortion and disregard for the truth, whether it’s a conspiracy theory with ‘Obamagate’ or this paedophile comment or the most ridiculous one, that this pandemic is a hoax.

rump’s children have been ever present since he announced his wildly improbable run for the presidency at Trump Tower in New York in June 2015. A year later, Don Jr and Ivanka’s husband, Kushner, were present at a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. It came to nought but raised questions about the methods of both men.

The children clocked up thousands of air miles campaigning while, behind the scenes, Kushner helped shape a crucial digital strategy. The family gathered with Trump on stage in New York when he stunned the world by winning. Since then, their influence has only grown.

‘I learned it by watching you’ Don Jr and Eric stepped in to run the Trump Organization, the family business, where they have been forced to deny persistent allegations they are exploiting the presidency for profit. Both have also come into their own as bomb-throwers on their father’s behalf.

Two years ago, Don Jr separated from his wife, Vanessa, and began dating Guilfoyle, a lawyer, Fox News host and, incongruously, the ex-wife of Gavin Newsom, then the liberal Democratic mayor of San Francisco, now the governor of California. She joined the Trump campaign last year and has proved every bit as zealous as her boyfriend.

In the coronavirus pandemic, the children have hit the ground running in ways Trump and Biden have not. Trump’s re-election team broadcasts live programming online seven nights a week. This week it launched The Right View, including Guilfoyle and Lara Trump, as a riposte to the popular daytime show The View, which has an all-female panel.

“I’m an outdoorsman, shooter, hunter, and not just, ‘I do one weekend a year to talk about it at a cocktail party for the next two years,’” said Don Jr, who has frequently admitted the irony of the son of a New York billionaire speaking on behalf of blue-collar Americans. “This is the way I choose to live my life when I’m not doing my day job.”

Democrats such as Vela, the former Biden adviser, find the Trump children and their partners as offensive as the president himself. “You’ve got to sell your soul if you’re gonna be a part of it,” he said. “It’s almost like a mafioso operation, the mafia of hate. There is so much hate and hatred filled in their bones and in their hearts. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“It’s very disturbing, the extent to which they’re willing to go, and I guess the most chilling example was where Eric said that after the election we’ll find out that the whole Covid pandemic was cooked up by the Democrats. That’s the extent to which they’re willing to bend reality to stand up for their father. It’s also the tragedy of the Republican party that a lot of politicians are in this same position where in order to stay aligned with Trump, they have to bend reality.”

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s a lot of talk about that but I think the stark political reality that will hit them all, whether Donald Trump wins re-election or not, is that there are a whole lot of Republicans waiting in the wings for this administration’s transition to lame duck and they are not going to go quietly into that good night.

People who feel themselves under threat have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend the homeland might be a good thing.

But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.

The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot.

In this presidential campaign, Trump’s nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while his immoral nature has taken center stage

What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a second term.

this election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?

During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible

You can see this separation in the polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016 battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16 percent of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28 percent now support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.

Some Republicans see Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.

“There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”