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Iran, had tried to influence the election by sending intimidating emails was a stark warning. Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Iran is building upon Russian techniques and trying to demonstrate that it, too, is capable of being a force in the election.

Iran opposes Mr. Trump’s re-election because its leaders believe that under a Biden administration, they might be able to revive their nuclear deal reached in 2015 with six world powers and restart international investment.

Mr. Ratcliffe has been attacked by intelligence officials and Democrats for being overly partisan and Mr. Wray has been the target of Mr. Trump’s fury, including for his repeated insistence that Russia was a threat to the election.

Iran has tinkered at the edges of American election interference since 2012, but always as a minor actor. Last year they stepped up their game, private cybersecurity firms have warned. They have caught Iranian operatives occasionally impersonating politicians and journalists around the world, often to spread narratives that are aimed at denigrating Israel or Saudi Arabia, its two major adversaries in the Middle East.

“But they have gone from propaganda to deliberate interference in this election,

“Their focus here is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation,” he said.

The officials also did not make clear whether either nation hacked into voter registration systems.The material obtained by Iran and Russia was mostly public, according to an intelligence official, and Iran was using it as an opposing political campaign might. Some voter information, including party registration, is publicly available, and voters’ names may have been merged with other identifying material like email addresses from other databases, according to intelligence officials, including some sold by criminal hacking networks on the “dark web.”

Some spoofed emails sent to voters contained links to a false and deceptive video that attempted to scare voters into believing the senders were also capable of manipulating the mail-in vote process, playing on fears that Mr. Trump has fanned with his insistence that mail-in ballots are subject to fraud.

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, and Tehran used it to send threatening, faked emails to voters that were aimed at influencing the presidential election, top national security officials announced on Wednesday evening.

There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, both of which would threaten to alter actual votes,

“This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, and Tehran used it to send threatening, faked emails to voters that were aimed at influencing the presidential election, top national security officials announced on Wednesday evening.

both of which would threaten to alter actual votes

And it was not clear that either nation hacked into voter registration systems

Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Mr. Ratcliffe said the effort was aimed at hurting President Trump, and intelligence officials have said Iran opposes the president’s re-election. But if the emails had the effect of intimidating Democrats, they could also have hurt Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee.

Trump told the crowd to "fight like hell."

The 75-page legal brief from Trump's attorneys expands upon their initial response to the House's impeachment last week, in which they argued that the trial was unconstitutional, that Trump didn't incite the rioters and that his speech spreading false conspiracies about widespread election fraud is protected by the First Amendment.

"And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," Trump said.

In their brief, Trump's lawyers argued that Trump's speech about fighting was metaphorical and he did not call for any violence.

Mr. Trump used the word 'fight' a little more than a handful of times and each time in the figurative sense that has long been accepted in public discourse when urging people to stand and use their voices to be heard on matters important to them

It's possible a handful of Senate Republicans will emulate Utah's Sen. Mitt Romney, the only member of his party to vote to convict Trump in his first trial. And Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who voted to impeach Trump, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post Monday encouraging Senate Republicans to vote to convict Trump, saying it "is necessary to save America from going further down a sad, dangerous road."

A majority of Senate Republicans have indicated that they will not wrestle with Trump's behavior but will take refuge in a questionable argument that a President who was impeached while in office for seditious behavior cannot be tried after returning to private life.

That means there is a little chance of a two-thirds majority to convict Trump among 100 senators who will serve as jurors in the chamber that became a crime scene to which many of them were witnesses.

While the managers will likely fail to secure a prohibition on Trump serving in federal office in future, they hope to so damn him in public perception that a political comeback in 2024 will be impossible.

Video of Trump declaring to an angry crowd he had called to Washington on January 6 "if you don't fight like hell, we are not going to have a country anymore," followed by clips of rioters shouting "fight for Trump" as they smashed their way into the Capitol will have a powerful effect.

The price to be paid for deserting an ex-president who still dominates his party is being demonstrated by the backlash directed at 10 Republicans who voted to impeach in the House.

Even after his presidency ended, Washington is under siege from extremism, Trump's trashing of truth with false claims of election fraud and unhinged conspiracies that show the fight to save US democracy did not end on Inauguration Day.

The trial will begin just a month after a now infamous day, when Trump greeted a huge crowd in Washington already primed for revolt by his weeks of false claims of election fraud. The subsequent invasion of the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress to certify Biden's election victory led to five deaths and saw Trump fans parading unimpeded through the halls of the iconic building as lawmakers fled to safety.

The trial will consume hours a day over the next few weeks, but it will be only one half of a compelling political story that is unfolding in Washington.Biden, three weeks into his term, is intensifying his efforts to stand up his administration and to rescue the country with vaccines before new variants of Covid-19 trigger another deadly wave of infections.

The new commander-in-chief has steered clear of impeachment drama, leaving it to the new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill to plow ahead.

Trump's hurriedly overhauled impeachment defense team on Monday laid out their strategy in pre-trial briefs.

"This was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on January 6 by a few hundred people," the lawyers wrote.

The Trump defense will also revive one of the long-held tropes of the ex-President's apologists -- that his aggressive rhetoric should be taken figuratively not literally, with a claim that his call for the mob to "fight like hell" was metaphorical.

His team has also posited, despite multiple lawsuits and certifications of votes by states and Congress, that there is no evidence to disprove his false claims of voter fraud -- so prolonging the Big Lie that the election was stolen from the former President.

In a counter filling on the eve of the trial on Monday, Democratic House impeachment managers accused Trump's defense of indulging in "contortions" to support his discredited claims of a "rigged" and "stolen" election.

"President Trump violated his Oath of Office and betrayed the American people," the brief said. "His incitement of insurrection against the United States government -- which disrupted the peaceful transfer of power -- is the most grievous constitutional crime ever committed by a president."

The claim that a former president cannot be tried after being impeached relies on a hyper-literal reading of the Constitution. Trump's supporters argue the trial is moot since impeachment is about removing a President from office and Trump has already left power.

"He wanted something to disrupt the electoral vote count that would mean he would no longer be President of the United States," Conway said."None of that is protected by the First Amendment. It's a flat out violation of his oath of office and it's impeachable and he should be punished by being barred from ever holding future federal office."

a modern-day Svengali.”

compared himself to Einstein and Gandhi while touting Nxivm as a “community guided by humanitarian principles that seek to empower people.”

he created a secret master-slave group for women within Nxivm called DOS, where stick-thin devotees were branded with his initials above their genitals, made to wear dog collars and submit to unwanted sex with Raniere and other members, the feds said.

who went by the title “The Vanguard” — preyed on the young as he committed what the FBI called “serious crimes against humanity.”

part of his bizarre plan to use her as some kind of “vessel” to supposedly achieve immortality — and took porno shots of her, according to testimony at his trial.

Many were then branded with a cauterizing pen in ceremonies videotaped by other members to prove their loyalty to the group, some women said.

“The world closed in on me,” she recalled. “Every degree of freedom I had was lost.”

In June 2019, the jury took under five hours to convict Raniere of all of the seven counts against him, including for sex-trafficking, racketeering, child pornography and forced labor. He faces 15 years to life on the charges.

The sentencing comes amid heightened interest in the case, with two recent docu-series — HBO’s “The Vow” and Starz’ “Seduced” — featuring survivors telling their stories.

Raniere, who did not testify at his trial, has also vowed to protest his innocence.

Facebook and Instagram are simply carrying on a longstanding American tradition: stoking the insecurities of teenage girls to cash in on them.

The global beauty industry generates $500 billion in annual sales, and social media is now an important driver, especially for the youngest target demographic, Gen Z.

The global weight management market was estimated at more than $260 billion in 2020, and is projected to grow to more than $400 billion by 2027.

Before American girls’ confidence was commodified by Instagram, it was at the whim of magazines filled with impossibly slender, airbrushed models and ads from industries relying on girls and women for revenue

That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol,” explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency.”

as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.

No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities.

Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.

At the core of this marketing, the message endures: You are riddled with flaws and imperfections. We will tell you what to buy, and what do, to fix yourself.

Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us.

After Szilard lobbied Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to oppose the use of his terrible creation, he recorded a weird, curiously believable conversation. “Oppie” told the Hungarian enigmatically: “The atomic bomb is shit.” When Szilard asked what he meant by that, Oppenheimer replied: “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang — a very big bang — but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”

Richard Rhodes, perhaps the best historian of the Bomb project, wrote in 1986: “Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.” Yet its fulfilment became his obsession.

Oppenheimer seemed untroubled by misgivings. He merely drove his team with a brilliance that inspired hero-worship from his colleague Edward Teller. “Oppie knew in detail what was happening in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analysing human as well as technical problems . . . He knew how to organise, cajole, humour, soothe feelings — how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.”

it was not him but the brutish Groves who was mandated by the US chiefs of staff to orchestrate the dropping of the two bombs, after the successful Alamogordo test. On August 6 Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington to report the destruction of Hiroshima. The scientist said: “Well, everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.”

The general said: “Yes, it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.” Oppenheimer responded: “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”

. In the weeks that followed, Oppenheimer became prey to spasms of remorse, although his attitude was always ambiguous, confusing to others and perhaps to himself.

When Teller asked him to work on further developments of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer said flatly: “I neither can nor will do so.” He left Los Alamos in October 1945, saying that pride in the laboratory’s achievement must be “tempered with concern . . . The peoples of the world must unite or they will perish.”

Curtis LeMay, the US air force chief who directed the firebombing of Japanese cities by B-29 Superfortresses that killed 300,000 Japanese before the first atomic bomb was dropped, said impenitently after the war: “Nothing new about death . . . We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo . . . than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

In 1954, amid McCarthyism sweeping the US, Oppenheimer fell victim to a witch-hunt and was stripped of his security clearance. This was later restored, and in the last years before his death from cancer in 1967, aged only 62, he regained a measure of his 1945 giant’s status.

Yet some liberals never forgave him for having disclosed the names of left-wing sympathisers and colleagues to the FBI. I met one such victim in 1965, his old friend Haakon Chevalier, a pretty broken man who had just published a book describing his intimate relationship with Oppenheimer. It was followed by profound disillusionment when he discovered that in 1942 “Oppie” had passed information to “the Feds” that later cost Chevalier his professorship at Berkeley.

Together with—and perhaps because of—its economic malaise, the country is living through a political earthquake. Germany’s wealth, its exemplary parliamentary democracy, and its big efforts to confront its Nazi history are no longer keeping nativist parties at bay.

Outside the EU, “made in Germany” goods struggle to find new clients. Exports to China have been roughly flat since mid-2015 and may even start to drop, as President Xi Jinping has made clear that he wants to make his country less dependent on European industry

The Federal Republic is the only big Euro member whose economy has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, German GDP has roughly stagnated since 2019. And German manufacturing is the main problem: Industrial output lags pre-pandemic levels by some 5 percent.

The reason Germany ceased to be Europe’s growth engine has less to do with Russian energy than with changing circumstances in the export markets where the country’s industrial champions once flourished

In the 2000s, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder slashed unemployment benefits and created a low-wage sector to help German exporters increase their market shares across Europe. Since then, many other European countries, including France and Italy, have made reforms to cut labor costs themselves, and Germany faces tougher competition in its biggest export market and has been running a trade deficit in goods with other EU members since 2020.

We are living through the end of German exceptionalism. The country’s economy is fragile, and the rise of the AfD makes its politics as unpredictable as those of Austria or Italy. In short, Germany is joining the European mainstream. And that means that trouble is ahead.

German car exports to China were down 24 percent in the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022

The U.S. is Germany’s second-largest market after the EU, accounting for 8.9 percent of its exports, but to top off Germany’s troubles, Washington is becoming more protectionist under Joe Biden.

The obvious solution is for Germany to spend more. Greater investment could raise productivity in a country where the railways have the worst delays among major European countries and cellphone and internet connectivity are underfunded

Investment could boost demand, and liberalizing policies could rebalance the economy toward services.

But a dogma of balanced budgets and debt avoidance remains deeply anchored among German politicians and voters.

Now Germany, whose effort to confront its Nazi history seemed to inoculate its politicians from having to deal with a large far-right party, is also falling prey to populism and nationalism.

ore and more governments across Europe are led by right-wing parties: in Italy, Sweden, Finland, and soon possibly Spain. In all of these countries, the center-right no longer has qualms about working with the far-right.

the penny has not yet dropped. Germany’s political elite hasn’t been moved to take the risky step of running up debts and liberalizing at the same time. But until it does, the country’s economy will likely lag European growth. And if the economy ceases to serve as a source of national pride, political forces may thrive by brandishing more nativist concepts of German identity.

The AfD’s rise to 20 percent in the polls—twice what it commanded in the 2021 parliamentary elections—has many causes. The party’s bastion is the formerly Communist east, where authoritarian attitudes and resentment of traditional parties feed off of feelings of having been the losers in Germany’s reunification

But something broader is going on. For Germans, the hallmark of good government is “Ruhe und Ordnung,” calm and order. The three parties in Scholz’s ruling coalition—the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business FDP—squabble over everything

The party has also benefited from a backlash against Germany’s progressive agenda on climate and migration

Despite the country’s reputation abroad as a climate champion, in a poll of seven European countries, Germans were the least willing among Europeans to switch to electric cars, cut meat consumption, or spend out of their own pockets to renovate their houses to save the climate.

As for migration, racist views are ingrained in Germany’s formerly Communist east

But the AfD has also been able to mobilize an anti-immigration electorate in big, rich, formerly West German states, such as Bavaria, the land of Siemens and Weisswurst, and Baden-Württemberg

the CDU will need to decide whether it will continue marginalizing the far-right or start working with it instead. The AfD is leading the polls in Thuringia and polling a strong second in Saxony

ermany is joining the European mainstream, with its political class struggling to counter rising far-right support and an economy that is no longer best-in-class. The two things that made postwar Germany unique in Europe are no more

the rise of the AfD is pushing Berlin to become an unreliable partner in Europe. The CDU was once the champion of Schengen, the EU’s policy to allow for passport-less travel across the continent. The party’s leader, Merz, clearly concerned about covering his right flank, has now called for reintroducing passport checks at Germany’s borders with other EU members, such as Czechia, in order to turn away migrants.

As the AfD criticizes the “reckless” spending of the Scholz government, the FDP and the chancellor are doubling down on spending cuts. Germany is becoming less willing to spend for itself and the EU.

The AfD may one day accede to national government, but it cannot do so on its own. To work in a coalition, the party will almost certainly have to compromise on its most radical policy propositions, such as closing the U.S. military base in Ramstein. But even with the AfD merely exerting pressure on German politics, the EU must sooner or later face an adjustment—to a future in which Germany is no longer an economic and political anchor so much as a source of instability.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries.

Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

There was extraordinary national unity after the 2001 terrorist attacks. But George W. Bush’s strategists argued that Republicans should “go to the country” on the issue of terrorism and “focus on war” in the elections of 2002 and 2004, making the case that Democrats endangered Americans’ security. On the campaign trail, Dick Cheney warned that if people made “the wrong choice” and voted Democratic, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” As Bush said Democrats were “not interested in the security of the American people,” Cheney claimed electing Republicans was “vital” for “defending our homeland.”

In that same year, Republicans close to the administration ran an infamous ad juxtaposing an image of Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), a triple amputee from his service in Vietnam, with images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein

Two years later, a group with ties to Bush did similarly to Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, with flimsy accusations that he lied about his Vietnam service and betrayed comrades.

Cheney was also the primary force for distorting intelligence about Iraq to make the case for war. He falsely claimed in 2001 that it was “pretty well confirmed” that the 9/11 mastermind met with Iraqi intelligence. He falsely called evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda “overwhelming” and said Hussein had “long-established ties with al-Qaeda.” He falsely called Iraq “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault … on 9/11.”

Those contagions — using disinformation and patriotism as political weapons — spread through the Republican Party and consumed it utterly with Trump’s triumph. Too late, Liz Cheney bravely stood against both, and is on the verge of political exile

All our Greek tragedy needs now is the catharsis: a glimmer of self-awareness from Dick Cheney about his role in causing this.

As a result, political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs. These leaders believe that they have more sway over their own region than the U.S. does.

“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,”

Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,”

Why has American power receded?

Some of the change is unavoidable. Dominant countries don’t remain dominant forever.

But the U.S. has also made strategic mistakes that are accelerating the arrival of a multipolar world.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. spent much of the early 21st century fighting costly wars. The Iraq war was especially damaging because it was an unprovoked war that George W. Bush chose to start. And the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, overseen by President Biden, made the U.S. look weaker still.

Among those mistakes: Presidents of both parties naïvely believed that a richer China would inevitably be a friendlier China — and failed to recognize that the U.S. was building up its own rival through lenient trade policies, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued.

Perhaps the biggest damage to American prestige has come from Donald Trump, who has rejected the very idea that the U.S. should lead the world. Trump withdrew from international agreements and disdained successful alliances like NATO. He has signaled that, if he reclaims the presidency in 2025, he may abandon Ukraine.

In the case of Israel, Trump encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory

Netanyahu’s extremism has contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas

An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, yesterday argued, “The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.” Netanyahu, Haaretz added, adopted “a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”

I understand that some readers may question whether the long era of American power that’s now fading was worth celebrating. Without question, it included some terrible injustices, be they in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala or elsewhere.

But it also made possible the most peaceful era in recorded history, with a sharp decline in deaths from violence, as Steven Pinker noted in his 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” And the number of people living in a democracy surged.

Smith concluded his Substack newsletter on the new Middle Eastern war this way:Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism,” to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police” and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.

The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse.

hilosophers and social scientists have long pondered the question of why people hold different beliefs and values

odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.

If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.

You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.

even when two groups agree on a moral foundation, they can radically disagree on how it should be expressed

Extensive survey-based research has revealed that almost everyone shares at least two common values: Harming others without cause is bad, and fairness is good. Other moral values are less widely shared

political conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, respect for authority, and purity—typically in a bodily sense, in terms of sexuality—more than liberals do.

Sometimes conflict arises because one group holds a moral foundation that the other simply doesn’t feel strongly about

One of the most compelling explanations comes from Moral Foundations Theory, which has been popularized by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU. This theory proposes that humans share a common set of “intuitive ethics,” on top of which we build different narratives and institutions—and therefore beliefs—that vary by culture, community, and even person.

When people fail to live up to your moral values (or your expression of them), it is easy to conclude that they are immoral people.

Further, if you are deeply attached to your values, this difference can feel like a threat to your identity, leading you to lash out, which won’t convince anyone who disagrees with you.

research shows that if you insult someone in a disagreement, the odds are that they will harden their position against yours, a phenomenon called the boomerang effect.

3. Listen more.

effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift. And sharing a gift is a joyful act, even if not everyone wants it.

so it is with our values. If we want any chance at persuasion, we must offer them happily. A weapon is an ugly thing, designed to frighten and coerce

A gift is something we believe to be good for the recipient, who, we hope, may accept it voluntarily, and do so with gratitude. That requires that we present it with love, not insults and hatred.

1. Don’t “other” others.

Go out of your way to welcome those who disagree with you as valued voices, worthy of respect and attention. There is no “them,” only “us.”

2. Don’t take rejection personally.

just as you are not your car or your house, you are not your beliefs. Unless someone says, “I hate you because of your views,” a repudiation is personal only if you make it so

he solution to this problem requires a change in the way we see and present our own values

when it comes to changing someone’s mind, listening is more powerful than talking. They conducted experiments that compared polarizing arguments with a nonjudgmental exchange of views accompanied by deep listening. The former had no effect on viewpoints, whereas the latter reliably lowered exclusionary opinions.

when possible, listening and asking sensitive questions almost always has a more beneficial effect than talking.

howing others that you can be generous with them regardless of their values can help weaken their belief attachment, and thus make them more likely to consider your point of view

for your values to truly be a gift, you must weaken your own belief attachment first

we should all promise to ourselves, “I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.”

if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world

generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.

Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as Covid deaths once again cluster around older people.

among people 65 and older, 13 percent are unvaccinated, 3 percent have a single Moderna or Pfizer shot and another 14 percent are vaccinated but not boosted.

“The government wasn’t sure about the booster shot,” he said. “If they weren’t sure about it, and they’re the ones who put it out, why would I take it?” Mr. Thomas said Covid recently killed a former boss of his and hospitalized an older family friend.

“In 2021, you see the mortality impact of the pandemic shift younger,” said Ridhi Kashyap, a lead author of that study and a demographer at the University of Oxford.

That changed last summer and fall, during the Delta surge. Older people were getting vaccinated more quickly than other groups: By November, the vaccination rate in Americans 65 and older was roughly 20 percentage points higher than that of those in their 40s. And critically, those older Americans had received vaccines relatively recently, leaving them with strong levels of residual protection.

As a result, older people suffered from Covid at lower rates than they had been before vaccines became available. Among people 85 and older, the death rate last fall was roughly 75 percent lower than it had been in the winter of 2020, Dr. Stokes’s recent study found.

The rebalancing of Covid deaths was so pronounced that, among Americans 80 and older, overall deaths returned to prepandemic levels in 2021, according to a study posted online in February.

But scientists warned that many older Americans remained susceptible. To protect them, geriatricians called on nursing homes to organize in-home vaccinations or mandate additional shots.

For some people, even three vaccine doses appear to become less protective over time against Omicron-related hospital admissions.

During the Omicron wave, Covid death rates were once again dramatically higher for older Americans than younger ones, Dr. Stokes said. Older people also made up an overwhelming share of the excess deaths — the difference between the number of people who actually died and the number who would have been expected to die if the pandemic had never happened.

Long-ago Covid cases do not prevent future infections, but reinfected people are less likely to become seriously ill.

Eventually, her family had to arrange a trip to a pharmacy on their own for a second booster.“It just seems that now the onus is put completely on the individual,” she said. “It’s not like it’s made easy for you.”

They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization

My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security priso

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet

they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones

My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks

I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry

We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades.

Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits

No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements.

And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?

Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail

But it starts an ocean away, during the Crimean War, 169 years ago.

Almost as soon as the phrase was coined, its definition was broadened to become shorthand for the British military more generally, particularly its courage in the face of long odds or superior numbers.

“Between the law-abiding elements of society and the criminals that prey upon them,” Mr. Parker said, “stands a thin blue line of defense — your police officer.” The police, in his vision, weren’t just protecting public safety; they were combating the decline of Western civilization, the rise of Communism, the moral laxity of postwar America, the decay of the nuclear family, and so on.

Like other mash-ups of identity flags with the American flag, the thin blue line flag is a rallying point for a marginalized identity, a way to lay claim to the American birthright, a demand for long-denied respect

Mr. Parker’s vision went beyond policing as a profession. In 1965, he told a civil rights commission investigating the Watts riots that “the police of this country, in my opinion, are the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” This belief, a half-century later, would animate an identity politics that blurred the blue line.

Blue Lives Matter is not just an expression of support and solidarity for the police, but a response to and rejection of Black Lives Matter. It suggests that it is not Black people whose lives are undervalued by society, but police officers.

The thin blue line would become the dominant metaphor for the police. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan said the thin blue line held back “a jungle which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization”; in 1993, President Bill Clinton called it “nothing less than our buffer against chaos, against the worst impulses of this society.”

As the L.G.B.T. American flag does, it exploits a visual pun, but much less playfully: The blue line divides America against itself.

Blue Lives Matter is a movement that belies the simplicity of its name: It can certainly mean that the police deserve respect for doing a critical and dangerous job. But it can also mean that overzealous racial politics have inverted the criminal justice system, punishing the peacekeepers, coddling the criminals and turning those who carry a badge into the most embattled and victimized group in the nation. Blue Lives Matter transformed policing into a tribal affiliation.

This blossoming identity was an opportunity for any politician bold enough to take it. While trust in the police was dropping among Black and Hispanic Americans, it actually was rising for white Americans

Donald Trump was particularly well suited to take advantage of the rise of policing as identity politics. His entrance onto the political scene in the 1980s was his call for the reinstatement of the death penalty and less oversight of police.

The Trump campaign cast the Democrats as enemies of law and order who sought to incubate riots in American cities and chaos at the border.

Mr. Trump claimed that while the Democratic ticket stood with “rioters and vandals,” he stood with “the heroes of law enforcement.”

After Mr. Trump’s prophecy came true and the soft coup of representative democracy denied him a second term, when his supporters rallied for one last stand on the grassy field in front of the Capitol, it was inevitable that they would see themselves as bearing the mantle of law and order, a thin blue line smashing through a thin blue line.

In the aftermath of Jan. 6, when the nation saw that flag held aloft by the rioters who attacked the Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone (he says they literally beat him with it), the thin blue line flag has become increasingly controversial among police officers. In 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department banned its public display on the job. In an email explaining his decision to his officers, Chief Michel Moore lamented that “extremist groups” had “hijacked” the flag.