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Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.

The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.

then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.

Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say

as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”

After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.

Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.

there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result

If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.

Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism

Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans

Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.

But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”

“They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did

A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed

When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.

Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.

He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”

indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies

I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine

I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal

do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?

reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”

A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.

cientists also point to data from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, which conducts a weekly random survey of the population. Just before the Christmas break, when schools were still open, the positivity rate among children was higher than in most adult groups, especially in those older than 11.

At least 30 cases of the more contagious U.K. variant were discovered at an elementary school in the Dutch village of Bergschenhoek, near Rotterdam, in December. Tests carried out on some 750 children, teachers and their relatives found that roughly 10% were infected with the virus. The local municipality on Wednesday began testing all 62,000 residents above the age of 2 to find out more about how the variant spreads.

Austria, one of the first European countries to shut schools in November, plans to reopen them gradually from Jan. 25, but in staggered systems and with millions of test kits distributed to reduce the risk of infection.

these technologies helped to alter attitudes about self-presentation and self-promotion. They trained Americans to focus on themselves, perfect their images and present themselves to others in words and pictures.

The spread of mass-produced mirrors in the late 19th century had a similar effect, enabling rich and poor alike to study their images, and try to perfect them.

After photography was introduced to the United States in 1839, it took off quickly, and Americans flocked to photographers’ studios.

technology companies promised consumers that if they purchased telephones, radios and phonographs, they need never feel lonesome again.

By the 1930s, editorialists were declaring that “Vanity is Sanity,” for well-adjusted individuals should care about their image and try to look their best. Lack of interest in one’s appearance signaled psychological problems

Whereas vanity had once been a sin, it now became a requirement for social success.

Our 19th-century forebears were resigned to the fact that they would sometimes be alone

Being lonely wasn’t pleasurable, but it wasn’t surprising or particularly worrisome, either. And like Henry David Thoreau, many even celebrated it, recasting it as solitude

Over the course of the 20th century, however, Americans gradually pathologized the experience of being alone

they increased the pressure on Americans to publicly celebrate their appearances and accomplishments.

In the 1940s, the word “loner” emerged as a pejorative description

the term solitude fell out of favor while the word loneliness came into wider use, reflecting a growing consensus that there was something wrong and even shameful about being alone

We are also obsessed with our phones because so many of us regard loneliness and boredom as pathologies with potentially negative consequences for our health

Before the mid-19th century Americans never experienced boredom, for the word didn't exist in English

, after the word boredom was coined, it spread, and during the late 19th century, it was increasingly used to describe the inner experience of empty moments

By the mid-20th century, psychologists were suggesting that boredom was a measurable problem and that individuals were entitled to diversion in daily life, a message which movie studios, radio producers, television tycoons and merchants eagerly took up

Americans soon began to regard it as a dangerous emotion that ought to be stamped out as quickly as possible.

the people who were pushing photography, telephones, radios, movies and other consumer goods did so by exploiting shifting mores around vanity, loneliness and boredom

they also exacerbated them, reinforcing the belief that people should present their best faces to the world and the conviction that they should always be in contact, and never be bored or unstimulated.

these ideas have become central to our daily lives. We harbor fewer reservations about vanity than our ancestors

We turn to our phones because we have become accustomed to celebrating ourselves, and to seek out the affirmation of others.

Radios and phonographs, likewise, came to fill the silences in American homes, creating a sense of companionship at all times.

these emotions are now considered feelings to be cured rather than endured.

we use our phones to seek out constant companionship and unending entertainment.

because we worry more about loneliness and boredom than our ancestors did, we’re more apt to turn to our phones since they promise to relieve these afflictions.

it’s important to remember that the vulnerabilities Silicon Valley exploits are far from inevitable and are instead a result of culture and history

The way our culture trains us to experience vanity, loneliness and boredom can be changed. We can shift our thinking to recognize the value of humility, of solitude and of empty moments

Obama’s approach to politics was marked by a circumspection that went even deeper than policies

To be conservative, as philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a movement hero, once put it, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” The former president channeled the sentiment faithfully when he said recently that “the average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.

His second inaugural address was a thoroughly conservative document, underscoring equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome. Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich praised it at the time, saying, “Ninety-five percent of the speech I thought was classically American, emphasizing hard work, emphasizing self-reliance, emphasizing doing things together.”

“At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”

Notwithstanding the “Change we can believe in” slogan that propelled his rise, his aim was never to turn things upside down.

Obama went out of his way to lecture that, after the civil rights era, “what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.”

Obama cast himself as a role model for young black men and repeatedly stressed that not all inequities in American society are attributable to discrimination, racial or otherwise. This posture helped earn him currency with the black electorate (in particular, older black voters), which votes overwhelmingly for Democrats but skews moderate to conservative on several issues.

He embraced respectability politics as a way to signal how conventional it was to have a first family of colo

The difficulty Democratic candidates have in grappling with Obama reflects the dissonance he’s generated for a decade: The center-left adores him, but to the far left, he’s a sellout.

He once argued that in certain circumstances, government programs created welfare dependency, saying that “as somebody who worked in low-income neighborhoods, I’ve seen it, where people weren’t encouraged to work, weren’t encouraged to upgrade their skills, were just getting a check, and over time, their motivation started to diminish.”

Favoring “the familiar to the unknown,” as Oakeshott wrote, was Obama’s disposition and also his political project: expanding traditional priorities — the familiar American Dream, not a reconceived one — to Americans for whom they had been denied. That meant building, gradually and at times almost reverently, on his predecessors’ foundation.

Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.

Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran.

The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart

Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent.

Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)

Values Education was introduced as a way to help young people think about their values in a completely non-judgmental way. Scenarios involving value choices were discussed, but to avoid any hint of indoctrination or imposition of any one set of values onto children, the ultimate conclusion was always that ‘there are no right or wrong answers’. This institutionalized a relativistic stance, leading some students to consider racial prejudice or cheating on exams as the same kind of choice as one’s choice of career.

n the 1970s-80s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of the stages of moral development which was adopted as a blueprint for a new kind of moral education. Kohlberg’s theory suggested that a characteristic of those individuals who have reached the higher levels of moral development is their ability to deal well with dilemmas. Inspired by this, educators present dilemmas in which the leading character has to make a choice between two good (or two bad) values, and they encourage the young people to discuss reasons why the character should do X or Y. This would promote the moral thinking of participants, thereby encouraging their moral development and ultimately translating into moral behavior. However, this approach framed everything as a dilemma, a choice between two rights or two wrongs. It also tended to over-intellectualize the nature of moral decision-making

the most recent (but perhaps also the most classical) innovation in moral education is Character Education. Building on Aristotelian notions of virtue and the educational approach of the ancient Greeks, Thomas Lickona and others have crafted a popular model in which such virtues as honesty, courage, integrity, and generosity are taught to students from kindergarten through high school by modeling, didactic stories, and programs rewarding good behavior, such as ‘school citizen of the month’.

Character Education aims to give students enough knowledge of what virtues and vices entail to act virtuously and discourage vice in daily life. It offers a vast improvement over the absence of value talk in the classroom

it is still problematic. Even Aristotle admitted that acting virtuously is not a matter of simply knowing the virtues. The trick comes in the application – doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. This is not easily achieved, and defies simple instruction

As Plato also pointed out in his dialogue The Meno, moral education is not the same kind of education as education in mathematics or history, where the ultimate goal is acquiring knowledge. We need to practice and apply virtues, and in doing so, we run up against the messiness of life. Is it always so clear what constitutes respect, courage, honesty, or how we demonstrate a virtue in action?

The approaches known as ‘philosophy for children’ (P4C) and ‘philosophy with children’ (PwC) offer a powerful alternative mode

Philosophy for/with children is not instruction in the ideas of the great philosophers; nor is it debates on the major ethical issues of our times. While it does not teach a particular set of values, it is not Values Clarification, which examines the beliefs of people but refuses to judge them

The methods and materials of philosophy ‘for’ and ‘with’ children differ dramatically, but its teachers and philosophers share a vision that philosophy is for everyone, including children. They believe that it can help anyone acquire critical reasoning skills, and build communities of inquiry in which we can practice the intellectual and moral virtues as we learn to negotiate across differences

A distinctive feature of the P4C/PwC approach is the ownership of the conversation by the young people themselves. By setting their own agenda, they actively engage in thinking and talking about the issues and ideas that matter to them, and not what matters to the teacher or the adults in their lives.

good thinking is nurtured. The facilitator’s role is that of a Socratic gadfly, challenging the participants to put forward their own ideas, but also enabling the testing of these ideas by communal scrutiny. Some ideas are better grounded than others, and the community’s goal is to discover what those ideas and grounds are, even as it remains open to revisiting and revising an idea that has been put aside. This means that ethical thinking is open-ended but not relativistic.

For individuals who see morality as black and white, this can be unsettling. Some adults worry that if we present these sorts of complicated notions to children, especially young children, we will confuse them, or leave them apathetic to morality. But this has not proven to be the case. Children rarely abandon the values of their families, unless those values turn out to be unsatisfactory in serious ways

The PwC movement is founded on the assumption that there are better and worse ways of thinking and acting, even if there may not be one single best way. This assumption is necessary for the enterprise of seeking better ways of thinking and living to be meaningful and genuine

In recent months it has raised its enrichment of uranium to 4.5 percent — higher than the 3.67 percent limit set by the deal but far from the 20 percent enrichment it was engaged in before the agreement.

In his address to the bankers, Rouhani acknowledged that the sanctions had caused economic pain. But he added that economic considerations could not be separate from foreign policy and national security, suggesting that Iran will not give in to US demands.

“Remember the dishwasher? You’d press it, boom! There’d be, like, an explosion. Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out,” he said. Trump then criticized newer models, claiming women – just women – across the country have to now wash their dishes “10 times”.

The rant follows months of increasing criticisms from Republican lawmakers to energy regulators over stricter environmental standards. According to the International Energy Agency, a common critique of energy-efficient appliances is that they are inefficient, resulting in more usage, reversing energy savings effects.

The criticisms also come just a day after some Republicans condemned bipartisan legislation to gradually eliminate or reduce heat-trapping chemicals in air conditioners and refrigerators.

Opponents pinpoint a potential rise in costs for consumers. But the bipartisan legislation has support from environmental advocates and appliance industry leaders even as Trump probably calculates it has appeal to a support base skeptical of environmental causes and hostile to government regulation.

“We are letting our government know that no matter what they do, we will never stay silent,” Nadxely Sanchez, of Voces de la Frontera, told the local Fox affiliate WITI.

“All of this is all part of [a] strategy and of course to draw attention away from our debate,” she said. “What do animals do? They just kind of pee on your carpet.”

"If the US leaves, people across the region will think that despite his flowery rhetorical devices, Trump does not really have a strategy for the Middle East and at the end of the day will fold and go home," Gerges said.

Watling questioned what Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran was aiming to achieve. Iran's long-term strategy in Iraq, on the other hand, is paying off.

Much of Iran's power in Iraq comes through militia groups that have roots in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war. Recruiting fighters from Iraq wasn't that difficult. Iraq was a Shia-majority nation led for more than two decades by brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, born a Sunni. Iran, which has long pitched itself as the world's leader of Shia Muslims, took in Shia prisoners of war and refugees, and turned them into soldiers who would go back to Iraq to act in Tehran's interests, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Some became part of what is now known as the Badr Organization, the report said, both a militia group and an anti-US political party in Iraq today.

As Iran made steady headway in the Iraqi government and military, the US' objective in Iraq has changed so many times that it's become muddy and unfocused.

According to Watling, there are now around 113,000 salaried personnel in the powerful Tehran-backed Iraqi militia group. Of those, some 60,000 are actively deployable as fighters, and of those, 36,000 are directed by Iran.

Despite achieving the regime change the US was looking for, with the capture and execution of Saddam, the US left Iraq in 2011 with an unsteady government in place. It had no choice but to send troops back to put out fires with the spread of ISIS. Iran also took part in the fight against ISIS, but it continued with its drive to boost influence in Iraq.

Anti-government protesters galvanized by deep economic grievances that have accumulated over many years have found themselves facing off with Iranian-backed forces.

Second, China’s future growth prospects will dim with every year of below-replacement birthrates, because low fertility creates a self-reinforcing cycle — in which a less youthful society loses dynamism and growth, which reduces economic support for would-be parents, which reduces birthrates, which reduces growth …

Yes, in an age of stagnation, CO2 levels won’t grow as fast, delaying some of climate change’s effects — but at the same time a stagnant society will struggle to innovate enough to escape the climate crisis permanently.

in the worst-case, to cite a recent paper by the Stanford economist Charles Jones, it risks “an Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”

the human race is increasingly facing a “global fertility crisis,” not just a European or American or Japanese baby bust. It’s a crisis that threatens ever-slower growth in the best case

the Chinese case is also distinctive, because cruel policy choices made its demographic problems worse.

by targeting minority and religious populations, Beijing is attacking the country’s more fecund groups, in what amounts to a statement that if Han birthrates have fallen, minority birthrates must be cut to match.

there is Western guilt as well, because the one-child policy was linked to a project hatched by Western technocrats, funded by Western institutions, and egged on by Western intellectuals — a classist, sexist, racist, anti-religious program that sought to defuse a “population bomb” that, we know now, would have defused itself

The Western effort died away as the population bomb fizzled, and while its Malthusianism endures around the edges of environmentalism and in European anxieties about African migration, mostly the population control crusade is recalled as a mistaken extrapolation, a well-meaning mistake.

As we contemplate the demographic challenge of the future, we should reserve particular opprobrium for those who chose, in the arrogance of their supposed humanitarianism, to use coercive and foul means to make the great problem of the 21st century worse.

ultimately telling people he was fine without it. He maintained that being “silenced” would infuriate his supporters.

Over the years of his presidency, as controversies and investigations of his conduct began to grow, television became a less reliable safe space. Broadcast networks, pressured to be more aggressive in their approach to him and his aides, asked tougher questions. With the exception of Fox News,

Mr. Trump’s White House aides said he loved tweeting and then watching the chyrons on cable news channels quickly change in response. For a septuagenarian whose closest allies and aides say often exhibits the emotional development of a preteen, and for whom attention has been a narcotic, the instant gratification of his tweets was hard to match.Advisers insisted that they were still exploring the possibility of another platform where the president could speak his mind without filter.

Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, said that if Mr. Trump did give such an address, it would force television networks to make a difficult choice: whether to follow Twitter in silencing the president or allowing him to speak to the American people.“I would say to many members of the media: Be careful what you wish for,” Mr. Miller said.

Thomas Sowell, at Stanford University, points to the British as responsible for no less than the invention of freedom. In Mr Sowell’s view, the British were a shining light of economic development, which other countries gradually learnt to imitate. (Fascinating new research explores a similar theory: that learning best practices from others is essential to growth and becomes harder the greater the cultural distance from economic leaders.)

According to James Blaut, an American historian, the year 1492—when Christopher Columbus landed in America and set off centuries of European colonialism—“represents the breakpoint between two fundamentally different evolutionary epochs”. From 1492 onwards, Europe pulled in raw materials, currency and labour, and deliberately held back the rest of the world.

Jared Diamond, at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that environmental factors played a crucial role in the European take-off. Mr Diamond argues that Europe was uniquely endowed with domesticable plants and animals. Its population was also more immune to diseases. These factors led to higher productivity and, crucially, higher population density. The upshot? The development of institutions such as cities, bureaucracies and literate classes, which contributed to economic growth.

The development of "open science" in the 16th century helped with the spread of economically useful ideas

Another theory suggests that the Glorious Revolution in Britain of the 1680s, which reduced the power of the monarch, was a crucial stepping-stone in the country’s economic development. After the revolution, people became less worried that their profits would be summarily seized by the Crown, as they had been in the past. And so they became keener to work hard. This theory is at the heart of the book "Why Nations Fail", by economist Daron Acemoglu and professor of government James Robinson.

the causes of the Great Divergence are “overdetermined”. Many different factors intertwined to create European dominance—and no single factor would have been enough on its own. This conclusion might seem like a typical academic fudge. But the point is that the Great Divergence was not simply caused by European culture. Rather, it emerged because a business-friendly, open and innovative economy was created—mostly by accident.

This needs to be addressed or else future generations of Americans will still be paying the price in decades to come.

Debt isn't always bad, however. There are times when it is useful, and now is one of those times. We need money to fight the pandemic, help the millions of people whose lives have been damaged, support businesses and prop up the economy until things get back to normal. We aren't out of the woods yet, even with the recent positive vaccine news, and we need to borrow more.

Here then is what the Biden administration should do. First, focus on getting the pandemic under control, helping those in need and supporting the economy.

These could include sensible cost control measures, such as increasing the retirement age and encouraging those who want to continue to work part time into retirement to do so.

Even at today's rock-bottom interest rates, we could quadruple federal education spending or send every family an annual check of $2,200 with the money we are spending on interest.

Once the economy is strong enough, as indicated by growth and employment (rather than political whims), the administration and Congress should gradually implement sensible measures to get control of the debt. This could include repealing some or all of the irresponsible tax cuts of the past years, reducing health care costs throughout the economy, cutting some of the near $1.4 trillion of tax breaks in the code and restoring sensible spending caps.

We also need to address our major trust fund programs that are facing insolvency in the upcoming years, including Social Security and Medicare.

Just because more debt is necessary right now doesn't mean it is harmless. We entered the last recession with debt as a share of GDP at 35%. This one is at 80% and we will leave it at well over 100%. US debt is growing faster than the economy and will break the all-time record set just after World War II as soon as 2023.

To Biden's credit, his campaign plan included trillions of dollars in revenue raisers and spending reforms, creating opportunities for lawmakers to fund new public investments in a fiscally responsible manner. It is a start, but there will be much more to do. Debt naysayers will want the new administration to opt for the free lunch approach -- borrowing rather than paying for new priorities -- but that is a dangerous economic plan in the long run that invites serious risk and leaves us vulnerable at a time we should be pursing an agenda of economic strength.

Residents were warned of possible landslides, massive flooding, storm surges of up to 5 meters (16 feet) and powerful winds that can blow away shanties. But after hitting a mountain range and repeatedly slamming into coastal provinces, the typhoon gradually weakened, although it remained potentially deadly as it blew out into the South China Sea, forecasters said.

One of the most powerful typhoons in the world this year, Goni evoked memories of Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattened entire villages, swept ships inland and displaced more than 5 million in the central Philippines in November 2013.

In a Manila gymnasium that was turned into an emergency shelter, COVID-19 outbreaks were an added worry of displaced residents. The Philippines has had more than 383,000 cases of the virus, the second-most in Southeast Asia behind Indonesia.

The Philippines is lashed by about 20 typhoons and storms each year. It’s also located on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are common, making it one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.

The federal minimum wage remains just $7.25 per hour and hasn’t been raised in more than a decade. It prevails in any state that doesn’t mandate a higher one.

As the Florida vote shows, increasing the minimum wage remains an immensely popular idea.

The first raise under the new law goes into effect on Sept. 30, 2021.

Constantine decided it was best to locate his new city at the site of old Byzantium, claiming it to be a New Rome (Nova Roma).

In 330 CE, Constantine consecrated the Empire’s new capital, a city which would one day bear the emperor’s name. Constantinople would become the economic and cultural hub of the east and the center of both Greek classics and Christian ideals.

Religion took on new meaning in the empire. Although Constantine openly supported Christianity (his mother was one), historians doubt whether or not he truly ever became a Christian, waiting until his deathbed to convert. 

One of Constantine’s early concerns was to provide enough water for the citizenry.  While Old Rome didn’t have the problem, New Rome faced periods of intense drought in the summer and early autumn and torrential rain in the winter

Under the leadership of his brilliant general Belisarius, Justinian expanded the empire to include North Africa, Spain and Italy. Sadly, he would be the last of the truly great emperors; the empire would fall into gradual decline after his death until the Ottoman Turks conquered the city in 1453 CE.

One of the darker moments during his reign was the Nika Revolt.  It started as a riot at the hippodrome between two sport factions, the blues and greens. Both were angry at Justinian for some of his recent policy decisions and openly opposed his appearance at the games.

he riot expanded to the streets where looting and fires broke out. The main gate of the imperial palace, the Senate house, public baths, and many residential houses and palaces were all destroyed

Forty days later Justinian began the construction of a new church; a new Hagia Sophia.

Much of the rebuilding, however, was lost during the Fourth Crusade (1202 -1204 CE) when the city was plundered and burned, not by the Muslims, but by the Christians who had initially been called to repel invaders but sacked the city themselves. Crusaders roamed the city, tombs were vandalized, churches desecrated, and Justinian’s sarcophagus was opened and his body flung aside. The city and the empire never recovered from the Crusades leaving them vulnerable for the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE.

Floyd’s death underscores that police work should be subject to oversight, and officers who violate policy and misuse their power should be subject to discipline. But the unions’ power is most notable in contracts that limit the accountability that, as the community can now see, is so desperately needed.

I used to say that the majority of officers are good but silently let a minority set the dominant culture. But now I believe that no one can be called a “good officer” if they are not working actively and openly to change the culture and unseat their toxic union leaders.

Waiting to stoke that resentment are police-union leaders such as Kroll, who defend even the more aggressive acts of officers and, even in a case as extreme as Floyd’s death, prevent any self-examination by blaming the victim.

Last year, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned so-called warrior-style training, which emphasizes physical threats to police officers rather than the benefits of de-escalating confrontations. Critics have implicated a variant of this training—a course titled “The Bulletproof Warrior”—in the shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis–St. Paul suburb in 2016. Kroll and the police federation defied Frey’s move by offering warrior-style training of their own.

If progressive local officials want wholesale reform of police tactics and culture, they will have to do something that runs counter to their own culture: take on union leaders.

Some local officials have also hesitated to demand tougher reforms in contracts because police unions often spend heavily in local elections to oppose any politician who challenges them.

Electing mayors and city-council members who support such reforms is not enough. Police-union leaders use back channels to go around local officials and get more conservative state legislators to block meaningful changes

at this moment, as massive marches across the country demand dramatic change, police unions have less leverage than they’ve ever had. I am not suggesting that cities should try to bust police unions. Far from it.

Physical shocks, however, can only be remedied by understanding and addressing the underlying physical causes. Our recent collective experience, whether in the public or the private sector, has been more often shaped by financial shocks, not physical ones. The current pandemic provides us perhaps with a foretaste of what a full-fledged climate crisis could entail

Pandemics and climate risk also share many of the same attributes. Both are systemic, in that their direct manifestations and their knock-on effects propagate fast across an interconnected world.

They are both nonstationary, in that past probabilities and distributions of occurrences are rapidly shifting and proving to be inadequate or insufficient for future projections.

Both are nonlinear, in that their socioeconomic impact grows disproportionally and even catastrophically once certain thresholds are breached

They are both risk multipliers, in that they highlight and exacerbate hitherto untested vulnerabilities inherent in the financial and healthcare systems and the real economy

Both are regressive, in that they affect disproportionally the most vulnerable populations and subpopulations of the world.

Finally, neither can be considered as a “black swan,” insofar as experts have consistently warned against both over the years

They also require a present action for a future reward that has in the past appeared too uncertain and too small given the implicit “discount rate.” This is what former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has called the “tragedy of the horizon.”

addressing pandemics and climate risk requires the same fundamental shift, from optimizing largely for the shorter-term performance of systems to ensuring equally their longer-term resiliency

The coronavirus pandemic and the responses that are being implemented (to the tune of several trillion dollars of government stimulus as of this writing) illustrate how expensive the failure to build resiliency can ultimately prove

In climate change as in pandemics, the costs of a global crisis are bound to vastly exceed those of its prevention.

both reflect “tragedy of the commons” problems, in that individual actions can run counter to the collective good and deplete a precious, common resource.

Neither pandemics nor climate hazards can be confronted without true global coordination and cooperation

there are also some notable differences between pandemics and climate hazards.

A global public-health crisis presents imminent, discrete, and directly discernable dangers, which we have been conditioned to respond to for our survival.

The risks from climate change, by contrast, are gradual, cumulative, and often distributed dangers that manifest themselves in degrees and over time.

What lessons can be learned from the current pandemic for climate change? What implications—positive or negative—could our pandemic responses hold for climate action?

the timescales of both the occurrence and the resolution of pandemics and climate hazards are different.

What this means is that a global climate crisis, if and when ushered in, could prove far lengthier and far more disruptive than what we currently see with the coronavirus (if that can be imagined).

Finally, pandemics are a case of contagion risk, while climate hazards present a case of accumulation risk.

Contagion can produce perfectly correlated events on a global scale (even as we now witness), which can tax the entire system at once; accumulation gives rise to an increased likelihood of severe, contemporaneous but not directly correlated events that can reinforce one another.

Climate change—a potent risk multiplier—can actually contribute to pandemics

For example, rising temperatures can create favorable conditions for the spread of certain infectious, mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, while disappearing habitats may force various animal species to migrate, increasing the chances of spillover pathogens between them.

Third, investors may delay their capital allocation to new lower-carbon solutions due to decreased wealth.

Factors that could support and accelerate climate action

For starters, certain temporary adjustments, such as teleworking and greater reliance on digital channels, may endure long after the lockdowns have ended, reducing transportation demand and emissions

Second, supply chains may be repatriated, reducing some Scope 3 emissions (those in a company’s value chain but not associated with its direct emissions or the generation of energy it purchases)

Third, markets may better price in risks (and, in particular, climate risk) as the result of a greater appreciation for physical and systemic dislocations.

There may, additionally, be an increased public appreciation for scientific expertise in addressing systemic issues.

there may also be a greater appetite for the preventive and coordinating role of governments in tackling such risks

Moreover, lower interest rates may accelerate the deployment of new sustainable infrastructure

lastly, the need for global cooperation may become more visible and be embraced more universally.

Factors that may hamper and delay climate action

Simultaneously, though, very low prices for high-carbon emitters could increase their use and further delay energy transition

A second crosscurrent is that governments and citizens may struggle to integrate climate priorities with pressing economic needs in a recovery

he environmental impact of some of the measures taken to counter the coronavirus pandemic have been seen by some as a full-scale illustration of what drastic action can produce in a short amount of time.

Finally, national rivalries may be exacerbated if a zero-sum-game mentality prevails in the wake of the crisis.

For governments, we believe four sets of actions will be important

First, build the capability to model climate risk and to assess the economics of climate change.

Second, devote a portion of the vast resources deployed for economic recovery to climate-change resiliency and mitigation

Third, seize the opportunity to reconsider existing subsidy regimes that accelerate climate change

Fourth, reinforce national and international alignment and collaboration on sustainability, for inward-looking, piecemeal responses are by nature incapable of solving systemic and global problems.

For companies, we see two priorities. First, seize the moment to decarbonize, in particular by prioritizing the retirement of economically marginal, carbon-intensive assets

Second, take a systematic and through-the-cycle approach to building resilience.

For all—individuals, companies, governments, and civil society—we see two additional priorities. First, use this moment to raise awareness of the impact of a climate crisis, which could ultimately create disruptions of great magnitude and duration.

That includes awareness of the fact that physical shocks can have massive nonlinear impacts on financial and economic systems and thus prove extremely costly.

Second, build upon the mindset and behavioral shifts that are likely to persist after the crisis (such as working from home) to reduce the demands we place on our environment—or, more precisely, to shift them toward more sustainable sources.

Moving toward a lower-carbon economy presents a daunting challenge, and, if we choose to ignore the issue for a year or two, the math becomes even more daunting.

it is also critical that we begin now to integrate the thinking and planning required to build a much greater economic and environmental resiliency as part of the recovery ahead.

This shift has been occurring for years, but it could present Trump and Republicans with a perfect storm of problems at the same time that the state has become the center of the political universe with close races for president, Senate and governor.

"We realize that we have been infiltrated by other people that have more liberal views... than we do," Cheryl Miles, a Trump supporter,

Martin County, after twice voting for President Barack Obama, narrowly backed Trump in 2016, helping him cut into margins in the bigger metropolitan areas.

Christian conservatives who were somewhat skeptical of Trump four years ago are now fully behind the Republican leader.

"He stands for Christian values," Miles said. "I know that sometimes when he talks, he doesn't talk the way I would like for him to talk. But I like the stands that he takes. And sometimes you have to look beyond what the person is saying and (to) what he is doing."

The greater area around Raleigh, including college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham, is known as the research triangle, because of the topflight universities that are crammed into a relatively small area.

Those institutions have not only attracted hundreds of thousands of more liberal voters to North Carolina, but they have provided the intellectual capital to fuel a growing technology and health care industry that has led to thousands of new jobs just over the last few years.

The couple had been on green cards for decades, unable to vote in any election. But then Trump won, and the couple said shortly thereafter they became citizens almost expressly to vote against the President.

"I'll be honest with you: I really want to vote against Trump. That was the primary thing."

just two weeks before Election Day, North Carolina remains a toss-up, according to multiple recent polls that find Biden with the narrowest of margins.

Obama, the last Democrat to win the state in 2008, carried North Carolina because of overwhelming turnout from Black and young Americans. Biden's path, while similar, has some notable differences: In order to carry North Carolina next month, Biden will lean on a coalition that is Whiter, more suburban and older than the one that delivered the state to Obama 12 years ago.

"I've got a pretty good fix that most of the ones going to the Trump rally are probably voting for me," said Kidwell, whose signs tout him as the "most conservative" member of the North Carolina General Assembly.

"He is going to (need to) boost his numbers in rural counties to make up for what looks like an even bigger defeat in Raleigh, Charlotte," said Michael Bitzer, a professor at Catawba College and an expert on the state's politics. "I am just not sure how much more he can squeeze out of those rural areas."

Trump, on the other hand, can't solely count on the same turnout from Eastern and Western North Carolina, the two areas that propelled him to victory four years ago.

He is staunchly against wearing masks to combat the coronavirus and did not wear one when greeting voters in Washington.

"It worries me more on the statewide and national elections. ... But I think we are going to do well. North Carolina is, even if our metro areas are more liberal leaning, we still have a good number of people who are conservative."

Brian Buck said it is "concerning" that liberals are "coming from up north down to North Carolina" and he feared it would eventually "change us from a toss-up state to a blue state."

"The damn Democrats don't realize that he is just the President. He is not God," Brian Buck said. "What was he supposed to do? Go into the basement and go hocus pocus and make a damn treatment for it? No. So they blame him for it, but he had no more control over it getting here than I did."

"I believe he is more for the Christians than the Democrats," said Sawyer. "And that is one of the most important things."

"In 2016, President Trump brought out a lot of voters in the Eastern part of the state that previously voted for Barack Obama, or didn't vote, because he wasn't a stereotypical Republican," said Nick Trainer, Trump's director of battleground strategy. These voters "saw Barack Obama as a change agent and saw Donald Trump as a change agent."

"I really don't trust Donald Trump," he said, wearing a Desert Storm veteran hat, US Army mask and white veteran T-shirt. "It has been awhile since there has been this kind of unrest in politics in this country. ... It is best not to discuss politics because there is always going to be some friction involved."

One of those so-called Yankees would be Bridgette Hodges, an African-American grandmother who moved to the state from New Jersey around a year ago to be closer to her family, like Sanaa, her grandchild. The duo waited for over two hours on a recent rainy Friday so Hodges could not only vote for Biden, but register as a North Carolina voter for the first time.

"There are two groups we need to be focused on and that is turning out the African American vote and also suburban women," said Meredith Cuomo, the executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party. "We have seen just a real shift in our demographics since 2016."

Turning out voters like Hodges and Puebla was the missing piece for Clinton in 2016, whose campaign went into Election Day believing she would win the state. But turnout was down among reliable Democratic voters and up with voters in Eastern and Western reaches of the state, delivering Trump the win.

"I don't think of myself as an anomaly, I think that younger Republican voters are more progressive... and it has now become a generational thing inside the party," said Plyler, his long red beard hanging out of his mask. "So, if Republicans are scared of these kinds of voters, then they are scared of Republicans. That's the shame of it."

Ms. Maddock helped fill 19 buses to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and defended the April armed intrusion into the Michigan Capitol. When Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, suggested at the time that Black demonstrators would never be allowed to threaten legislators like that, Ms. Maddock wrote on Twitter, “Please show us the ‘threat’?”“Oh that’s right you think anyone armed is threatening,” she continued. “It’s a right for a reason and the reason is YOU.”

The lead organizer of the April 30 armed protest, Ryan Kelley, a local Republican official, last week announced a bid for governor. “Becoming too closely aligned with militias — is that a bad thing?” he said in an interview.

In the first major protest in the country against stay-at-home orders, thousands of cars, trucks and even a few cement mixers jammed the streets around the Statehouse in Lansing, in what Ms. Maddock called Operation Gridlock. About 150 demonstrators left their vehicles to chant “lock her up” from the Capitol lawn — redirecting the 2016 battle cry about Hillary Clinton against Ms. Whitmer. A few waved Confederate flags. About a dozen heavily armed members of the Michigan Liberty Militia turned up as well

woven through Michigan’s militia timeline is a persistent strand of menace. In the early 20th century, the Black Legion, a paramilitary group that included public officials in Detroit and elsewhere, began as an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and was linked to numerous acts of murder and terrorism.

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing, were reported to have associated with militia members in Michigan, though Mr. Olson said they had been turned away because of their violent rhetoric. In the aftermath, militias were largely exiled to the fringes of conspiracy politics, preparing for imagined threats from the New World Order.

in recent years, as the Republican Party has drifted further to the right, these groups have gradually found a home there, said JoEllen Vinyard, an emeritus professor of history at Eastern Michigan University who has studied political extremism. Much of their cooperation is centered on defending gun ownership, she said

epublicans have controlled both houses of the Michigan Legislature for a decade and held the governor’s mansion for the eight years before Ms. Whitmer took office in 2019. Mr. Trump’s brash nationalism had alienated moderate Republicans and independents while pushing the party to the right.

Surrounded by militiamen about two weeks later in Grand Rapids, at an event also organized by Mr. Howland and Mr. Kelley, the senator said in a speech that they had taken him to task for his “jackasses” comment and he effectively retracted it.

Ms. Maddock declared Michigan a “tyranny” that night on the Fox News Channel, though she later distanced herself from the armed men. “Of course the militia is disappointing to me, the Confederate flag — look, they’re just idiots,

When local armed groups in Michigan began discussing more demonstrations, most Republicans shunned them at first. “They were scared of the word ‘militia,’” recalled Phil Robinson, a member of the Liberty Militia.

As the Legislature met on April 30 to vote on extending the governor’s restrictions, Mr. Kelley and his militia allies convened hundreds of protesters, including scores of armed men, some with assault weapons. One demonstrator hung a noose from the back of his pickup. Another held a sign warning that “tyrants get the rope.” Dozens entered the Capitol, some angrily demanding entrance to the lower chamber.

“We were harassed and intimidated so that we would not do our jobs,” said Representative Donna Lasinski, leader of the Democratic minority. Lawmakers were terrified, she added.

Mr. Maddock, the Republican legislator and Ms. Maddock’s husband, recognized some of the intruders and left the House floor to confer with them. “I like being around people with guns,” he later told The Detroit News.

Mr. Trump sided with them, too. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” he tweeted. “These are very good people.”

Roughly a dozen to 18 armed groups are scattered across Michigan in mostly rural counties, their membership fluctuating with political and economic currents. Estimates of active members statewide are generally in the hundreds.

“I was able to see that they are patriots that love their country like the rest of us,” she said, adding that they are “all Republicans.”

Other Republicans also came to accept the presence of armed activists. Ms. Gatt, who took part in protests organized by Mr. Kelley and Ms. Maddock, said she felt “intimidated by the militia when I first started getting involved,” but soon changed her mind.

The state G.O.P. quickly jumped into the fight. In June, a nonprofit group linked to the Republican Party began providing more than $600,000 to a new advocacy group run in part by Ms. Maddock that was dedicated to fighting coronavirus restrictions. A charity tied to Mr. Shirkey kicked in $500,000.

Critics argued that race was an unstated factor in the battle over the stay-at-home order. The Republicans who rallied against the rules were mostly white residents of rural areas and outer suburbs. But more than 40 percent of the deaths in Michigan early on were among African-Americans, concentrated in Detroit, who made up less than 15 percent of the state’s population

The Black Lives Matter protests in Michigan were rarely violent or destructive, and the largest took place in Detroit. But Republicans in the rest of the state reacted with alarm to the flashes of violence elsewhere around the country, and President Trump reinforced their fears with his warnings about “antifa.”

“Liberals look for trouble and civil unrest and conservatives PREPARE for it,” Gary Eisen, a Republican state legislator and owner of a concealed-weapon training business, wrote on his Facebook page. “I thought maybe I would load up a few more mags,” he added, later saying he had been joking

He accused Democrats of encouraging violence. “The Democrats have got antifa; they have got BLM,” he said. “The Democrats championed all of this stuff from a leadership level.”

More prominent Michigan Republicans portrayed the Black Lives Matter movement as a looming threat, too. Ms. Maddock told the news site MLive.com that the “destruction” caused by the protests was “absolutely devastating” and “inexcusable.”

At the peak of the protests against police violence, though, Mr. Kelley’s American Patriot Council still aimed its sharpest attacks at Governor Whitmer and her stay-at-home order. It released public letters urging the federal authorities to arrest her for violating the Constitution by issuing a stay-at-home order. “Whitmer needs to go to prison,” Mr. Kelley declared in a video he posted on Facebook in early October that was later taken down. “She is a threat to our Republic.”

A few days later, federal agents arrested more than a dozen Michigan militiamen, charging them in a plot to kidnap the governor, put her on trial and possibly execute her.

It was the culmination of months of mobilization by armed groups, accompanied by increasingly threatening language, and Mr. Trump declined to condemn the plotters. “People are entitled to say, ‘Maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t,’” he declared at a rally in Michigan.

Hours after the Nov. 3 election, Ms. Maddock wrote on Facebook: “35k ballots showed up out of nowhere at 3 AM. Need help.” She urged Trump supporters to rush to “monitor the vote” at a ballot-counting center in Detroit. “Report to room 260 STAT.”

Mr. Kelley, with Mr. Howland and their armed militia allies, showed up for a rowdy protest outside the ballot counting. Later that month Mr. Kelley told a rally outside the Statehouse that the coronavirus was a ruse to persuade the public to “believe Joe Biden won the election,” The Lansing State Journal reported. One woman held a sign saying “ARREST THE VOTE COUNTERS.”

When attempts to stop the counting failed, Ms. Maddock in December led 16 Republican electors trying to push into the Michigan Capitol to disrupt the casting of Democratic votes in the Electoral College. During a “Stop the Steal” news conference in Washington the next day, she vowed to “keep fighting.”

Mr. Kelley and Mr. Howland were filmed outside the U.S. Capitol during the riot. Both men said they did not break any laws, and argued that the event was not “an insurrection” because the participants were patriots. “I was there to support the sitting president,” Mr. Kelley said.

Mr. Shirkey, the Michigan Senate leader who came around to work with the militias, declined to follow the movement behind Mr. Trump all the way to the end. Summoned to the White House in November, Mr. Shirkey refused the president’s entreaties to try to annul his Michigan defeat.

But in an interview last week, the lawmaker said he nonetheless empathized with the mob that attacked Congress.“It was people feeling oppressed, and depressed, responding to what they thought was government just stealing their lives from them,” he said. “And I’m not endorsing and supporting their actions, but I understand where they come from.”