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History will remember 2015 as the year when The Republican Party As We Knew It was destroyed by Donald Trump. An entity called the GOP will survive — but can never be the same.

the Trump phenomenon has torn the party apart, revealing a chasm between establishment and base that is far too wide to bridge with stale Reagan-era rhetoric. Can you picture the Trump legions meekly falling in line behind Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? I can’t either.

What Trump has done is call out the establishment on years of dishonest rhetoric. Progressives often asked why so many working-class whites went against their own economic interests by supporting the GOP. The answer is that Republicans appealed to these voters on cultural grounds, subtly exploiting their resentments and fears

One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.

The dirtiest word in the marxist vocabulary is “neoliberal,” which stands for an economy based on capitalist principles and processes. Students have learned that “neoliberal” is equivalent to evil. Two students, independently, recently said to me that “we need to replace capitalism,” although they had no suggestions about what to replace it with. That half the world tried to replace capitalism in the 20th century, with disastrous results, they apparently had no idea. That capitalism has brought unparalleled prosperity, if not peace and happiness, is unknown to students. They have been taught that the only products of capitalism are exploitation and oppression. Globalization is taught as the expansion of exploitation and oppression worldwide. The great economic developments in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the economic progress in Africa, is terra incognita to students, taught only problems but no successes.

Spectres are haunting Earth—the spectres of anti-communism. From Wahhabism to neoliberalism, overproduction to debt, the disastrous “war on terror” to the genocide of the welfare state, and from cold war game theory to cybernetics’ networked offspring, the internet—these are all anti-communist projects that came back to haunt us. In this apocalyptic climate, where CO2, ISIS and HFT (High Frequency Trading) stand for the self-annihilation of this civilization on a cultural, economic, political and biological level, we propose The Kids Want Communism. This ongoing clandestine and public series of events marks ninety-nine years to the October Revolution.

“Communism” might sound like an irrelevant term for many people today, but more than any other word in our political vocabulary, communism is the radical negation of the current regime which celebrates exploitation and inequality. It is a cosmos that was devoured by the black hole that is 1989–91. This cosmos includes many communisms; an epic reestablishment of property-free communities, communal indigenous societies, real-existing socialism with its achievements and crimes, the long history of anti-Fascist resistance, egalitarian mysticism, the dialectic abolition of capitalism through its internal dynamics, the uncharted, un-exploitable pockets of resistance that cannot be appropriated by capitalism, the already present humane solidarity and camaraderie shared by people everywhere and the political proposal of the emotion called “love.”

more fundamentally, that Trump got within 100 miles of the White House to begin with represents a massive failure of the system.

I say that because there was little mystery about how spectacularly corrupt he was — not just boorish, sexist and racist, but someone who had spent a career lying in public and engineering one grift after another to exploit people and cheat the gullible out of their money, whether it was Trump University or the Trump Institute or the Trump Network, or his habit of refusing to pay contractors, the exploitation of foreign models, or his foundation that was essentially a scam, or his apparent eagerness to have sketchy figures from the former Soviet Union use his properties for money laundering. We knew it all.

whatever chance we have at true accountability may only come because Trump and those around him aren’t capable of mounting a competent conspiracy or an effective coverup.

some politicians think they are simply too brilliant to be reduced to the mere level of giving a voice to those they exist to serve, exploiting the prominence that comes with constituents selecting them as their representative and then making a packet out of it.

Then there is the revolving door of British politics. Public office gives you lots of marketable advantages: prominence, connections, knowledge of the inside workings of government. These can then be exploited by major corporations, wealthy individuals and media oligarchs to gain even more power over our corrupted democracy.

Then there’s the parlous state of British journalism, increasingly an exclusive gilded club for those whose parents have healthy bank balances. Talented working-class aspiring journalists are discriminated against because they can’t live off the Bank of Mum and Dad. With few exceptions, only the well-to-do can afford to do the unpaid internships and expensive journalism masters’ degrees that increasingly must adorn the CVs of those with hopes of making it into journalism

“The way ads are targeted today is radically different from the way it was done 10 or 15 years ago,” said Frederike Kaltheuner, who heads the corporate exploitation program at Privacy International. “It’s become exponentially more invasive, and most people are completely unaware of what kinds of data feeds into the targeting.”

“In the next election, I think it is inevitable that every single voter will have been profiled based on what they have been reading, watching and listening to for years online,”

Data providers also say the information stored and shared is anonymous, but that doesn’t mean it stays that way. In 2017, for example, German researchers tied data that was supposedly anonymous back to specific individuals. They found revealing things like the medication used by a German politician and a German judge’s use of pornography.

Mr. Ullrich offers a fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.

Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”

Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”

Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”

“Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.

In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”

Who Killed the Men of England? The written record of history meets genomics, evolution, demography, and molecular archaeology.

more than a million men vanished without a trace. They left no descendants. Historians know that something dramatic happened in England just as the Roman empire was collapsing. When the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in that northern outpost in the fourth century a.d.--whether as immigrants or invaders is debated--they encountered an existing Romano-Celtic population estimated at between 2 million and 3.7 million people. Latin and Celtic were the dominant languages.

Yet the ensuing cultural transformation was so complete, says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, that by the eighth century, English civilization considered itself completely Anglo-Saxon, spoke only Anglo-Saxon, and thought that everyone had “come over on the Mayflower, as it were.”

For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It’s like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you.

Bannon, Wolff writes, came to understand that the lies were “compulsive, persistent and without even a minimal grounding in reality.” This is not to deceive the public. This is simply the way Trump behaves — in private and public

Recall this famous passage from Ron Suskind, reporting on the Bush White House for the Times:

the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy.

On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000

Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median

In this northeastern corner of Namibia, on the borders of Angola and Botswana, a Canadian oil company called ReconAfrica has secured the rights to explore what it believes could be the next -- and perhaps even the last -- giant onshore oil find.

The oilfield that ReconAfrica wants to harness is immense. The firm has leased more than 13,000 square miles, or some 30,000 square kilometers, of land in Namibia and neighboring Botswana.

The find -- potentially containing 12 billion barrels of oil -- could be worth billions of dollars.

Earlier this month, amid a blizzard of news both domestic and foreign, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the time to ban a powerful Ukrainian oligarch from setting foot in the United States.

The choice also was notable given Ukraine’s contentious status in U.S. politics due to its role in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment and lingering Republican allegations about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s dealings there.

“We see it as both, unfortunately, prevalent in so many places, but also a little bit of an Achilles’ heel when we can put the spotlight on it. Because when people see the corruption of their leaders, that’s a good way to undermine support for said leaders.”

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Why are we like this?The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.

The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites.

At the heart of any precedent is the belief that once acknowledged, it is actionable. A historical precedent offers not only a pattern but also a promise. We are assured by a rule — given what has preceded, here is how we must proceed — and reassured by a pledge: If we act rightly, we will be around to act again.

Is it possible that the real trap, though, is the still widely unquestioned assumption that Thucydides was a political realist? That if he does offer lessons, they are not found in the study of international relations but in the study of human nature

The Athenian leader of the Melian expedition, who justifies the destruction of Melos by claiming that might makes right, portends the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily.

mong those in favour of Brexit, there is a widely held belief that a favourable trade deal can easily be negotiated with the United States. But this flies in the face of the evidence: throughout history, the US has proved to be a ruthless negotiator where its economic interests are involved.

This sleight of hand by Roosevelt was a way around Congress and the Debt Default Act of 1934 which disallowed any loans to countries who were in default on their obligations, which included the UK. Further Acts of Congress during the 1930s prevented the sale of armaments and of loans to belligerents.But it became clear that the US was only prepared to provide support under rigorous conditions.

The US Government was prepared to support Britain in the war against the Germans, but its ultimate aim was to supplant the UK in the world economy. From 1940 onwards Morganthau had pressured the British Government to sell off its large US investments in companies such as Shell, Lever Brothers, insurance companies and others, as well as investments elsewhere in the world. He also pressured Britain to run down its gold and foreign currency reserves which were already more or less exhausted by 1941.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

If the United Kingdom is to survive, it will have to change fundamentally, so that Scotland does not secede and our regions can once again feel part of it.

Recent events are better understood as resulting from the power of competing nationalisms: Brexit nationalism, seeking national independence from Europe; Scottish nationalism; Welsh nationalism; and Irish and Ulster nationalisms. The risk is that “getting Brexit done” is leaving Britain undone and, by destabilising the careful balance between the Irish and British identities in Northern Ireland, threatening the very existence of the United Kingdom.

In this respect, last month’s election result seems less like an enthusiastic endorsement of any party than a plea for radical change. The old postwar social contract, based on times when manufacturing, making a product in which you had pride, and mining which kept the nation’s lights on, gave people dignity and respect, is seen as at breaking point, with each of its four pillars approaching collapse.