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The Constitution is not, however, as Justice Robert Jackson once famously wrote, “a suicide pact.” That phrase is usually used to suggest that government can legitimately overstep its bounds in times of emergency. But it also refers, I think, to moments when “we the people” pour a national libation of Kool-Aid and demand that everybody drink.

Clearly a large proportion of American citizens—not as many as voted for Hillary Clinton, but still, under our strange system, enough—wanted Trump as their president and now hope that he fulfills the loud promises he repeatedly made to the country.

But those promises are the problem. Donald Trump ran on a platform of relentless, thoroughgoing rejection of the Constitution itself, and its underlying principle of democratic self-government and individual rights. True, he never endorsed quartering of troops in private homes in time of peace, but aside from that there is hardly a provision of the Bill of Rights or later amendments he did not explicitly promise to override, from First Amendment freedom of the press and of religion to Fourth Amendment freedom from “unreasonable searches and seizures” to Sixth Amendment right to counsel to Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship and Equal Protection and Fifteenth Amendment voting rights.

Conservative talk-show hosts, who stoke right-wing populism for a living, reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump’s campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that, “with the case of Trump, there’s a much bigger upside than downside.” In July, Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump.”

Even the most moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager, who have made careers of arguing that private character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Mark Levin, who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network, vowed not to. “Count me as Never Trump,” he declared in April. But in September he announced, “I’m voting for Trump.”

Among big-time national conservative talk-show hosts, Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership after Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn’t just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism.

Authorities in Germany are monitoring almost 500 Islamic extremists they believe pose a potential security threat, officials said Friday

three men suspected of planning to carry out an attack in the country for the Islamic State group.

While Germany hasn't suffered mass-casualty attacks by Islamic extremists of the type seen in France and Belgium over recent months, authorities say the country is a target and the risk of attacks is high.

Facebook scrambled on Monday to respond to a new and startling line of attack: accusations of political bias.

Gizmodo, which said that Facebook’s team in charge of the site’s “trending” list had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative news sources. The social network uses the trending feature to indicate the most popular news articles of the day to users.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, hardly a conservative ally, weighed in on Twitter: “Aside from fueling right-wing persecution, this is a key reminder of dangers of Silicon Valley controlling content.”

Horizontal inequality is the term of art for inequality measured, not between individuals, but between racially or culturally defined groups.

like it or not, horizontal inequality, racial inequality above all, will define the general election.

Defining oneself at least in part by membership in a group is part of human nature. Even if you try to step away from such definitions, other people won’t.

rump has become the hillbilly vehicle for revenge upon the elites who have manipulated them for decades.After 52 years of abuse by their rulers, this “base” has finally turned on its leaders. The irony is that the only option for the now-former dominant Republicans is going to be to fall in line with them behind Trump.

They have no place else to go: They will follow those they had so easily manipulated for so long; they will support Trump. If they don’t, their influence will disappear.

This is not new. Small-town Americans had fallen completely out of media favor by 1960

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

From an economic standpoint, Bannon is talking mumbo jumbo. Protectionism and immigration exclusion retard growth; they do not promote it. We do not lose “sovereignty” when our consumers enjoy a higher standard of living thanks to imported goods. And in the regulations department, what could be more of a regulatory burden than cutting legal immigration, trying to influence which suppliers to use via a border adjustment tax or bullying companies about where they set up their plants?

This is not about sovereignty; it is about creating an even more powerful government, one that is oblivious to economic reality and ignores the political and economic upheavals that the policies create.

If he has been listening to U.S. business leaders, allies, informed members of Congress or the Federal Reserve chairman, he must have figured out how counterproductive his nationalist ideas are. (We’ve tried this before in the 1930s — with poor results.) And yet the appetite to decimate liberal Western democracies and shred an international system that has maintained relative peace and prosperity is unabated.

It is clear by now that Russia’s government has dug in against outside intervention in Syria, its longtime partner and last firm foothold in the Middle East. Less well known is the position taken by the Russian Orthodox Church, which fears that Christian minorities, many of them Orthodox, will be swept away by a wave of Islamic fundamentalism unleashed by the Arab Spring.

This argument for supporting sitting leaders has reached a peak around Syria, whose minority population of Christians, about 10 percent, has been reluctant to join the Sunni Muslim opposition against Mr. Assad, fearing persecution at those same hands if he were to fall. If the church’s advocacy cannot be said to guide Russia’s policy, it is one of the factors that make compromise with the West so elusive, especially at a time of domestic political uncertainty for the Kremlin.

The issue of “Christianophobia” shot to the top of the church’s agenda a year ago, with a statement warning that “they are killing our brothers and sisters, driving them from their homes, separating them from their near and dear, stripping them of the right to confess their religious beliefs

Israel arose as a secular, social democratic country inspired by Western European democracies. With time, however, its core values have become entirely different. Israel today is a religious, capitalist state. Its religiosity is defined by the most extreme Orthodox interpretations. Its capitalism has erased much of the social solidarity of the past, with the exception of a few remaining vestiges of a welfare state

The modern combination between democracy and Judaism was supposed to give birth to a spectacular, pluralistic kaleidoscope. The state would be a great, robust democracy that would protect Jews against persecution and victimhood. Jewish culture, on the other hand, with its uncompromising moral standards, would guard against our becoming persecutors and victimizers of others.

The founders believed that democracy was the only way to regulate the interests of many contradictory voices. Jewish culture, consolidated through Halakha, the religious Jewish legal tradition, created a civilization that has devoted itself to an unending conversation among different viewpoints and the coexistence of contradictory attitudes toward the fulfillment of the good.

A fierce dispute has erupted between Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond and campaign group Survival International over Diamond’s recently published and highly acclaimed comparison of western and tribal societies, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

each claiming the other has fallen into a delusion that threatens to undermine the chances for survival of the world’s remaining tribal societies.

Survival accuses Diamond of applying studies of 39 societies, of which 10 are in his realm of direct experience in New Guinea and neighbouring islands, to advance a thesis that tribal peoples across the world live in a state of near-constant warfare.

a speech this month by a Stanford University lecturer and entrepreneur named Balaji S. Srinivasan. The speech gained attention in technology circles. But it deserves a wider audience, because it was an unusually honest articulation of ideas that are common among members of a digital overclass whose decisions shape ever more of our lives.

told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become “the Microsoft of nations”: outdated and obsolescent. When technology companies calcify, Mr. Srinivasan said, you don’t reform them. You exit and launch your own. Why not do so with America?

In practice, this vision calls for building actual communities that would be beyond the reach of the state that Silicon Valley’s libertarians despise. But in the near term, Mr. Srinivasan noted, there are piecemeal ways to opt out of the society — like spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns. What Mr. Srinivasan called “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” he explained, “basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”

President Obama is a Christian (despite the fact that most Republicans apparently still believe that his “deep down” beliefs are Muslim, according to one poll conducted last year.)

In fact, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, there have only been four “religiously unaffiliated heads of state in American history,” the last being Rutherford B. Hayes, who left office in 1881. This, however, does not mean that they did not believe in God.

Now it is almost unconscionable to think of a president who didn’t believe in God. In fact, a poll last year by the Pew Research Center found that not believing in God was the most negative trait a presidential candidate could have among a variety of options, even more negative than having an extramarital affair.

Fleeing ISIS tyranny: Agony of the Yazidis

The faith's roughly 600,000 members are taught that for centuries, they have been persecuted by the majority Muslim population that surrounds them.

Yazidi leaders often say their community suffered 73 massacres and genocides.

“There is no order, there is no system, and in a country governed by the rule of law, that is a cause for concern,” Mr. Seehofer told reporters on Sunday. He said that officials were straining to process and house thousands of newcomers, and that some of them were economic migrants, not people fleeing persecution.

“We need better controls in general, because we have determined that in recent days, many of those on the move are really not refugees,”

As George W. Bush’s administration drew to an end, the brand of ambitious, expensive, Manichaean, militaristic foreign policy commonly dubbed “neoconservative” seemed on the verge of collapse.

Today, hawkishness is the hottest thing on the American right. With the exception of Rand Paul, the GOP presidential contenders are vying to take the most aggressive stance against Iran and the Islamic State, or ISIS. The most celebrated freshman Republican senator is Tom Cotton, who gained fame with a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that the United States might not abide by a nuclear deal. According to recent polls, GOP voters now see national security as more important than either cultural issues or the economy. More than three-quarters of Republicans want American ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq, and a plurality says that stopping Iran’s nuclear program requires an immediate military strike.

What explains the change? Above all, it’s the legend of the surge. The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it. Because of Obama’s troop withdrawal, and his general refusal to exercise American power, Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart. “We had it won, thanks to the surge,” Senator John McCain declared last September. “The problems we face in Iraq today,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal argued in May, “I don’t think were because of President Bush’s strength, but rather have come about because of President Obama’s weakness.”

Denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under occupation, a group of veterans from an elite, secretive military intelligence unit have declared they will no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians” in required reserve duty because of what they called “our moral duty to act.”

In a letter sent Thursday night to their commanders as well as Israel’s prime minister and army chief, 43 veterans of the clandestine Unit 8200 complained that Israel made “no distinction between Palestinians who are and are not involved in violence” and that information collected “harms innocent people.” Intelligence “is used for political persecution,” they wrote, which “does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict.”

“After our service we started seeing a more complex picture of a nondemocratic, oppressive regime that controls the lives of millions of people,”

'Not safe': French Jews mull Israel emigration

The grim and violent climax to the Paris hostage crisis was followed with horror wherever the news is watched. Israel's community of French-speaking Jews followed the unfolding drama with particular sadness but without surprise.

Israel's Channel 10 interviewed one of the survivors of the siege at the kosher supermarket who had hidden in a basement cold room

The U.S. Army field manual defines "the rule of law" as follows: "The rule of law refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency."

it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms," they declared. "From the perspective of many around the world, the U.S. appears to claim, in effect, the legal right to kill any person it determines is a member of al-Qaida or its associated forces, in any state on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret evidence, evaluated in a secret process by unknown and largely anonymous individuals—with no public disclosure of which organizations are considered 'associated forces,' no means for anyone outside that secret process to raise questions about the criteria or validity of the evidence, and no means for anyone outside that process to identify or remedy mistakes or abuses."

Unfortunately, the U.S. government violates "rule of law" norms in other areas too. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not operate with "procedural and legal transparency." The Office of Legal Counsel adopts highly contestable yet totally secret interpretations of statutes that dramatically affect policy outcomes. Citizens and corporations are served with secret court orders and often feel confused about whether they are even permitted to consult with counsel. Laws against revealing classified information are not enforced equally—powerful actors routinely leak official secrets with impunity, while whistleblowers and dissidents are aggressively persecuted for the mere "mishandling" of state secrets. The director of national intelligence committed perjury without consequence. President Obama has blatantly violated a duly ratified, legally binding treaty that requires him to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. He also violated the War Powers Resolution by participating in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi without securing the approval of Congress. And he won't even clarify exactly what groups he considers us to be at war with! That is only a partial list.

A high-ranking member and spiritual leader of Al-Shabaab has pledged allegiance to ISIS, a move that further fractures the Somali-based jihadi group and spreads the reach of ISIS farther into Africa.

The Al-Shabaab-linked source told CNN that members of the group now fear for their lives as other political leaders systematically try to root out possible ISIS supporters within their ranks.

For weeks, Al-Shabaab's secret police, known as the Amniyat, have been arresting and jailing members within the insurgent group who they believed would switch their allegiance from al Qaeda to ISIS.