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In Graham, N.C., a city of roughly 15,000 people between Greensboro and Durham, the police said protest organizers had failed to coordinate with city officials in planning their rally, and that it became “unsafe and unlawful.”

“I’m encouraged that more than 90 million Americans have already cast their ballots, which, if you do the math, is the equivalent of the entire 1996 presidential election,” Jeh C. Johnson, who served as secretary of homeland security during the Obama administration, said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

Officials in New Jersey told a local newspaper that the motorcade stopped near the Cheesequake Service Area — about 30 miles outside New York City — and “backed traffic up for about five miles.”

In Graham, N.C., a get-out-the vote rally on Saturday ended with police using pepper spray on some participants, including young children, and making numerous arrests. Organizers of the rally called it flagrant voter suppression.

“large militia presence” drawn by President Trump’s own event nearby.

Mr. Trump has not committed to a peaceful transfer of power.

Sunday’s incidents came a day after a group of Trump supporters in Texas, driving trucks and waving Trump flags, surrounded and slowed a Biden-Harris campaign bus as it drove on Interstate 35, leading to the cancellation of two planned rallies. The F.B.I. confirmed on Sunday that it was investigating the incident.

On Saturday, President Trump tweeted a video of the incident with a message, “I love Texas!” After the F.B.I. announced it was investigating, he tweeted again, saying, “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” and instead “the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA.”

Vehicles with Trump flags halted traffic on Sunday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, N.Y. Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.

The group settled a lawsuit last month against officials in Graham who they accused of violating the First Amendment rights of protesters.

“We are very concerned about groups lurking and trying to intimidate voters in particular communities,” Ms. Clarke said. Her group’s election protection hotline received calls from nearly a dozen counties in Florida just over the past week, she said, reporting individuals or groups harassing voters at the polls.

A separate set of anti-Trump protesters marched in New York City to counter the pro-Trump caravans, leading to some scuffles and arrests.

Groups that monitor voting have been preparing for intimidation at the polls at least since September, when protesters disrupted voters at a polling location in Fairfax, Va.

Of particular concern are militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose members have lurked on internet chat boards like 4Chan. “We are keeping an eye on them,” said Joanna Lydgate, national director of the Voter Protection Program which works closely with law enforcement on voting issues.

Yet it never mattered. She couldn’t get enough voters to listen.Why was this?Tiresome to say, but part of it can be chalked up to gender.

We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

Here’s the snippet of her listing possible reasons Trump hadn’t released his tax returns (he’s a tax evader, he’s in hock to mysterious creditors, he’s not the bazilionaire we think), all of which turned out to be true;

And if you reread Hillary’s speeches, you can see that her words were really unsparing and precise.

Hillary did warn us. “Step back and think about it,” she wrote in “What Happened.” “The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.”

If Biden is elected — and God willing, he shall be (spit, knock wood, toss salt) — maybe he’ll take her advice. In this way, but also perhaps others.

But Donald Trump has since made no disguise of the fact that he’s willing to win this election at almost any cost. He went so far as to say he needed to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with a justice who’d break what he assumed would be a 4-to-4 vote, knowing the election could be decided there.

Knowing that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, Trump falsely claimed (again) that ballots received after Election Day, even if they’re in perfect accordance with a state’s requirement of a postmark by Election Day, are illegitimate. He applauded supporters of his who swarmed around and trapped a Biden-Harris campaign bus.

ut that’s a veritable rom-com next to the horror show of 2020, whose full terrors took shape after Biden committed to his presidential bid. He knew going in that Trump would fight dirty, exit messy and bequeath an even more toxic political environment than he inherited. He couldn’t foresee the breadth and depth of America’s hurt right now.

Biden would also confront a restive crew in his own party. If Democrats controlled the Senate, their fury during Trump’s presidency would transform into an insistence on any or all of the following: sweeping action to address climate change; sweeping action to expand health insurance; the sweeping aside of the filibuster; the expansion of the Supreme Court; an immigration overhaul; the placement of high-profile progressives in high-profile cabinet slots; the destruction of what stretches of the border wall Trump managed to construct; and the investigation and even prosecution of his henchmen.

But if Trump is ousted, the glue dissolves, laying bare the distance between Biden and many younger Democrats.

But it’s not just American politics that’s in disarray. It’s our whole information ecosystem. Trump’s presidency fortified the alternate realities that Americans live in, the contradictory sets of facts that they accept and the competing truths that they tell

(3) What of those still in the Trump administration who could play a role in averting a disaster?

I appeal to them to be ready. Be prepared. Coordinate privately with others you trust. If you serve in the Trump administration now, it could eventually fall upon you, whether you’re serving in DOJ or DOD or DNI or DHS—or even in the White House—to decide whether to cooperate with an illegal order or an anti-Constitutional scheme.

Plan now for what you would do in such a situation to publicize what is being done in the shadows, to thwart illegal activities, to save the rule of law and of the Constitution. Be prepared. Discuss this discreetly now with others who might cooperate in averting disaster. Be ready to speak up and to act. The odds are such actions may not be necessary. But we can’t be sure.

Trump's near simultaneous warning on Wednesday that he thinks the election will end up being decided by the Supreme Court also raises the risk of a constitutional imbroglio likely to be worse than the disputed 2000 election.

His rhetoric escalated as he yet again politicized the effort to quell the pandemic by threatening to override regulators on the question of whether a newly developed vaccine would be safe in a highly irregular move.

his anti-democratic instincts and prioritization of his own political goals amid a national emergency show he plans to allow nothing -- not the health of Americans, the sanctity of US elections or the reputation of the Supreme Court -- to prevent him from winning a second term.

Trump's latest attempts to create uproar came amid new efforts to subvert the traditional mechanisms of government for his own gain

Trump is advancing a fake reality that Covid-19 is dying out at a moment when alarm bells are ringing about a possible winter second wave

The revelations from inside the West Wing, which came a day after the United States recorded its 200,000th death from the pandemic, show how the White House effort to end the crisis has been systematically repurposed to service Trump's hopes of a second term

Trump has spent years weaponizing executive power for his political and personal gain: he was impeached, after all, for trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the election,

he is driving America to a dangerous place in the weeks leading up to the election, and that the most tense and divisive days for many years could be ahead

Washington was already on edge, given the raised stakes of a looming election and the sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court, which is promising the most confrontational confirmation battle in years

Trump is well within his rights to nominate a replacement for Ginsburg -- a move that will enshrine an unassailable conservative majority, potentially for decades.

But the President's suggestion that the Supreme Court could be called in to adjudicate the election threatens to trigger new fury over the nominating process. If a candidate is installed in the coming weeks it will raise the possibility that a new justice who is recently beholden to the President for a lifetime appointment could be called upon to rule on his political fate in a clear and obvious conflict of interest.

"I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it's very important that we have nine justices," Trump said, referring to the election

"because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it's a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court and I think having a four-four situation is not a good situation if you get that."

In recent days, the President has declared the US is turning the "corner" on the pandemic, even though experts warn that a second wave of infections could build off an already elevated base and lead to tens of thousands more deaths.

Political interference also rippled through Trump's response to reports that the Federal Drug Administration was considering tougher standards for a Covid-19 vaccine to ensure that volunteers used to test it did not suffer side effects.

in the health crisis and urged people to “use the word ‘cure’” in reference to emerging therapies to treat the virus, even though no treatment has emerged that meets that description.

“On the masks, you have two stories,” Mr. Trump said, claiming falsely that most people who wear masks contract the virus.

Perhaps notably, Mr. Trump said he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election — a promise he declined to make in the first debate — though he quickly added the qualification that he would insist on an “honest election” and raised unsubstantiated theories about voter fraud

“Polls give people a false sense of security, and they think they don’t have to turn out to vote,” he said. “Is there going to be a peaceful transfer of power? That’s a big question. The big worry is that he won’t accept the results, or he’s going to incite violence.”

“I find this individual so disgusting,” said Jane Kelly-Forest, 61, who lives in a suburb of Des Moines. “You want to believe the polls, and you want to believe that people will see what’s right in front of their eyes

"We know from the rioters themselves that if they had found Speaker Pelosi, they would have killed her,"

The House impeachment managers revealed for the first time Wednesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was evacuated entirely from the US Capitol complex during the insurrection to a secure off-site location.

Romney told reporters after the video played that it was "obviously very troubling" and that he hadn't known he had come that close to the rioters.

Wednesday's security footage also showed for the first time how the then-vice president was evacuated during the episode as rioters breached the Capitol, looking for him.

Some of the new security footage Democrats presented Wednesday showed how close Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and security detail came to encountering the rioters.

The footage shows Schumer walking up a ramp with his security when the group is forced to quickly change directions and run back in the direction they came.

"They came within just yards of rioters," said Rep. Eric Swalwell,

The Democrats showed how rioters were calling out for Pelosi as they moved through the halls of the Capitol, before showing new security footage of Pelosi's staffers barricading themselves in a conference room not long before rioters entered her suite of offices, trying to force open the door where the aides were in hiding.

The footage shows Pence and his family quickly moving down a set of stairs.

"As the rioters reached the top of the stairs, they were within 100 feet of where the vice president was sheltering with his family, and they were just feet away from one of the doors to this chamber," she explained. In one video, the crowd can be heard chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they stood in the open door of the Capitol building.

"After President Trump had primed his followers for months and inflamed the rally-goers that morning, it is no wonder that the vice president of the United States was the target of their wrath, after Pence refused to overturn the election results," Plaskett continued.

No. 2 Senate Republican John Thune of South Dakota saying the House impeachment managers did an "effective job" and were "connecting the dots" from Trump's words to the insurrection

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he found much of the House impeachment managers' case against Trump jarring, adding that the rioters' attempts to thwart a peaceful transfer of power should alarm anyone who loves America.

Still, there's no sign that Senate Republicans are going to consider convicting Trump, no matter how compelling the Democrats' presentation may be. Forty-four of the 50 Senate Republicans voted Tuesday that the trial was unconstitutional, a defense most if not all of those senators are likely to cite if they vote to acquit Trump.

Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, a Democratic House impeachment manager, choked up as she closed her remarks by describing the loud bang that was heard when she was in the chamber that had been surrounded by rioters.

"So they came, draped in Trump's flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Dean said. "And at 2:30 p.m., I heard that terrifying banging on those House chamber doors. For the first time in more than 200 years, the seat of our government was ransacked on our watch."

"I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know. We know a mob reached the Capitol and wreaked havoc in the building. I'm waiting for them to connect that up to President Trump and so far that hasn't happened," he said.Asked if he is worried the video will have an emotional impact on the jury, he said, "It would have an emotional impact on any jury. But there are two sides of the coin and we have not played ours."

In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.

many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.

“As an American, I think there is a lot of good to be said about our libertarian tradition,” Dr. Jared Baeten, an epidemiologist and vice dean at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said. “But this is the consequence — we don’t succeed as well as a collective.”

That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries.

First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions.

The New York Times set out to reconstruct the unique failure of the United States, through numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world. The reporting points to two central themes.

When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.

That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.

Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.

one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.

Nearly every country has struggled to contain the coronavirus and made mistakes along the way.

it quickly became clear that the United States’ policy was full of holes. It did not apply to immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from China, for example. In the two months after the policy went into place, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China.

On Jan. 31, his administration announced that it was restricting entry to the United States from China: Many foreign nationals — be they citizens of China or other countries — would not be allowed into the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks.

A travel policy that fell short

In retrospect, one of Mr. Trump’s first policy responses to the virus appears to have been one of his most promising.

The administration’s policy also did little to create quarantines for people who entered the United States and may have had the virus.

ven more important, the policy failed to take into account that the virus had spread well beyond China by early February. Later data would show that many infected people arriving in the United States came from Europe

South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan largely restricted entry to residents returning home. Those residents then had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival

South Korea and Hong Kong also tested for the virus at the airport and transferred anyone who was positive to a government facility.

“People need a bit more than a suggestion to look after their own health,” said Dr. Mackay, who has been working with Australian officials on their pandemic response. “They need guidelines, they need rules — and they need to be enforced.”

Travel restrictions and quarantines were central to the success in controlling the virus in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia, as well as New Zealand, many epidemiologists believe. In Australia, the number of new cases per day fell more than 90 percent in April. It remained near zero through May and early June, even as the virus surged across much of the United States.

the tolls in Australia and the United States remain vastly different. Fewer than 300 Australians have died of complications from Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. If the United States had the same per capita death rate, about 3,300 Americans would have died, rather than 158,000.

there is a good chance that a different version of Mr. Trump’s restrictions — one with fewer holes and stronger quarantines — would have meaningfully slowed the virus’s spread.

travel restrictions had been successful enough in fighting the coronavirus around the world that those views may need to be revisited.“Travel,” he said, “is the hallmark of the spread of this virus around the world.”

Traditionally, public health experts had not seen travel restrictions as central to fighting a pandemic, given their economic costs and the availability of other options, like testing, quarantining and contact tracing

But he added that

By early March, with the testing delays still unresolved, the New York region became a global center of the virus — without people realizing it until weeks later. More widespread testing could have made a major difference, experts said, leading to earlier lockdowns and social distancing and ultimately less sickness and death.

While the C.D.C. was struggling to solve its testing flaws, Germany was rapidly building up its ability to test. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a chemist by training, and other political leaders were watching the virus sweep across northern Italy, not far from southern Germany, and pushed for a big expansion of testing.

By the time the virus became a problem in Germany, labs around the country had thousands of test kits ready to use. From the beginning, the government covered the cost of the tests. American laboratories often charge patients about $100 for a test.

Without free tests, Dr. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, said at the time, “a young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people.”

Germany was soon far ahead of other countries in testing. It was able to diagnose asymptomatic cases, trace the contacts of new patients and isolate people before they could spread the virus. The country has still suffered a significant outbreak. But it has had many fewer cases per capita than Italy, Spain, France, Britain or Canada — and about one-fifth the rate of the United States.

One measure of the continuing troubles with testing is the percentage of tests that come back positive. In a country that has the virus under control, fewer than 5 percent of tests come back positive, according to World Health Organization guidelines. Many countries have reached that benchmark. The United States, even with the large recent volume of tests, has not.

In Belgium recently, test results have typically come back in 48 to 72 hours. In Germany and Greece, it is two days. In France, the wait is often 24 hours.

The conflicting advice, echoed by the C.D.C. and others, led to relatively little mask wearing in many countries early in the pandemic. But several Asian countries were exceptions, partly because they had a tradition of mask wearing to avoid sickness or minimize the effects of pollution.

The double mask failure

By January, mask wearing in Japan was widespread, as it often had been during a typical flu season. Masks also quickly became the norm in much of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and China.

In the following months, scientists around the world began to report two strands of evidence that both pointed to the importance of masks: Research showed that the virus could be transmitted through droplets that hang in the air, and several studies found that the virus spread less frequently in places where people were wearing masks.

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”

The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”

Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.

Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.

But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.

he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.

At the time, Gates suggests, the campaign did not dwell on whether the answer was undemocratic or problematic but instead on their view that it was effective.

While the Washington establishment thought Trump’s answer was terrible, Gates writes, the campaign viewed it differently: as a statement that would appeal to voters who appreciated “Trump’s breaking with protocol, his ‘fearlessness’ when it came to challenging the status quo.”

“There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,

People who go to college “are often from more advantaged backgrounds, and they end up doing very well in the labor market,”

more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all

almost 60 percent of America’s educational debt is owed by households in the nation’s top 40 percent of earners, with an annual income of $74,000 or more.

Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger.

Without a parallel effort to curb tuition growth, one-time debt relief could actually lead to more higher-education debt in the future as students take on larger loans

Mr. Looney said that canceling $50,000, at a projected cost of $1 trillion, would be “among the largest transfer programs in American history,”

Student debt load has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed both credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages, and much of it falls on Black graduates, who owe an average of $7,400 more than their white peers at the time they leave school.

The legal argument for debt cancellation by executive action hinges on a passage in the Higher Education Act of 1965 that gives the education secretary the power to “compromise, waive or release” federal student loan debts

The government has struggled to get all borrowers who would benefit from income-linked plans enrolled in them, in part because the loan servicers it hired to work with borrowers and collect their payments have not guided people through the complicated process of getting and staying enrolled.

The “benefit of outright cancellation is simplicity,”

“There’s no question that student debt is a problem in this country, but simply forgiving student loans is not the answer,” Mr. Thune said.

CRT might have started off as an esoteric academic theory about structural racism. But it has now become a generic term for widely publicized excesses in diversity education, such as disparaging “individualism” and “objectivity” as examples of “white supremacy culture” or teaching first-graders about microaggressions and structural racism.

You don’t have to be a Republican to be put off by the incessant attention on race in so many classrooms.

George Packer wrote in the Atlantic in October 2019 that he knew “several mixed-race families” that transferred their kids out of a New York City school that “had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising ‘affinity groups.’”

Packer spoke for many liberal parents when he protested the tendency to make “race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance.” As an example, he cited Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) saying, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

This is the kind of “stupid wokeness” that Democratic strategist James Carville blamed for his party’s setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey — and it is something that Democrats need to disavow if they want to win outside of deep-blue enclaves

Democrats should admit that, even as racism remains a pervasive problem, some efforts to combat it backfire if they exacerbate racial divisions or stigmatize White students.

liberals today need to focus on the collateral damage that Republicans inflict in the name of fighting CRT: They are trying to ban books and fire educators. In short, they are practicing the very “cancel culture” they decry.

Conservatives argue that CRT, with its focus on group identity, is un-American. But what’s more un-American than attempting to ban books and fire teachers for their views? That’s what happens in China. Democrats can win the CRT debate if they call out the illiberal excesses of both the woke left and the anti-woke right.

As the historian Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC last night after the hearing, Trump “probably wanted to declare martial law.”

the insurrection was a close-run thing, noting that if “Trump and those rioters had been a little bit faster, we might be living in a country of unbelievable darkness and cruelty.”

But who cares? After all, inflation is too high, and gas is still too expensive, and that’s a bigger problem than the overthrow of the government, isn’t it?

In a country that still had a functional moral compass, citizens would watch the January 6 hearings, band together regardless of party or region, and refuse to vote for anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump, whom the committee has proved, I think, to be an enemy of the Constitution of the United States

His party, as an institution, supports him virtually unconditionally, and several GOP candidates around the country have already vowed to join Trump in his continuing attack on our democracy. To vote for any of these people is to vote against our constitutional order.

It’s that simple.

Lake is one of the most extreme election deniers and Trump sycophants in the GOP, but the Journal thinks she’d be great on the issue of school choice, as though the funding of education would be the big issue if Lake conspires with other Trump cultists across the United States to deliver the final blow to the notion of the peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.

To vote for anyone still loyal to a party led by the narcissistic sociopath who put our elected officials and our political system itself in peril is to abandon any pretense of caring whether the United States remains a constitutional democracy. The question is whether enough of us will care, in little more than three weeks from now, to make a difference.

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.

his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”