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most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives — all of our children’s lives — by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his “nuclear button” on Twitter.

There’s an old joke, recently cited by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, that describes where we are right now: A guy falls from a 50-story building. As he flies by the 25th floor, someone asks how it’s going. “So far, so good!” he says.

. Trump, Wolff’s reporting shows, has no executive function, no ability to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country’s interest is like demanding that your cat do the dishes. His enablers have no such excuse.

She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”

I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.

Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.

Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”

Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.

That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.

It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.

The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.

“I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.

The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”

“Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.

But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.

Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?

I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.

Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”

I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.

I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.

The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”

But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.

Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.

The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”

Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.

Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.

Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”

“I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”

But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”

So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?

"Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem for all of us,"

Up until now, the nationwide vaccine campaign has seen demand outstrip supply, but Mokdad says he believes that will soon change. By May, he believes, "We will have more vaccines than people willing to take the vaccine."

The numbers who may refuse the vaccine remain potentially too high to contain a respiratory virus such as SARS-CoV-2, which requires a large segment of the population to be immune.

But the fall and winter could be a different story. Scarpino says he believes that more contagious variants such as the one first reported in the U.K. will dominate the fall and winter COVID-19 season, raising the herd immunity threshold. Variants with higher transmissibility may require a larger share of the population to be immune before they can be contained.

"What most of us want is a safe return to something that looks more normal," says Samuel Scarpino, who models the coronavirus outbreak at Northeastern University. "That to me means 80% to 85%, probably, vaccinated."

And roughly 20% of the population are children under the age of 16, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine — making it even more crucial that adults do get vaccinated.

Nobody knows exactly how large, but based on other diseases, researchers believe it is far above the current 32% of the U.S. population that's gotten at least one shot to date.

"It's very hard to convince people to take the vaccine in summer, when everything is going good,"

Scarpino and Mokdad say the problem will not be immediately apparent. Both scientists expect COVID-19 cases to drop over the summer months when a combination of vaccinations and warm weather will dramatically slow the virus down. Mokdad says he thinks the improved conditions will paradoxically make vaccination more difficult.

Moderate rates of vaccination will prevent a nationwide crisis such as that seen during the winter of 2020 and 2021, he says. But he worries regional outbreaks could still overwhelm hospitals, close schools and force local governments to reinstitute restrictions in different parts of the United States, especially in areas where vaccination rates are low.

The reasons for saying "no" to a vaccine are often complex.

"I don't think there's one particular group," says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "I don't think that it works to classify people who are vaccine hesitant all having the same reason for being vaccine hesitant."

Koltai says that misinformation is proliferating right now, often tailored to different groups with different grievances

"You need to speak to these different groups: the minority groups, the Republicans and the other people who feel like they have some distrust in science," she says. Often the best way to do so, she says, is through groups and leaders at a local level who are in favor of vaccination.

Last week, the Biden administration launched a major initiative to try and encourage vaccination by enlisting faith groups, unions and even NASCAR to promote getting vaccinated. It's the kind of broad, grassroots effort experts say can help.

The question is, will it be enough? "We need to vaccinate as much as possible right now, stop the circulation of this virus in the U.S. and elsewhere," Mokdad says. "Then we can control it."

at least one lawmaker who was in a holding area was already positive before the chaotic events forced hundreds of people to gather together.

more than 50 lawmakers and 220 workers in Congress who have either tested positive, or are presumed to have been infected with the coronavirus.

Coleman, who had taken the first of the required two doses of the coronavirus vaccine, says she is "experiencing mild, cold-like symptoms."

Jayapal is pushing for people in Congress to show greater care in following safety guidelines, and for anyone who ignores mask requirements to be punished — including senators and representatives.

"Any Member who refuses to wear a mask should be fully held accountable for endangering our lives because of their selfish idiocy,"

Mr. Barr, 70, is the strongest proponent of presidential power to hold the office of attorney general since Watergate.

He managed to heal fissures between the White House and the Justice Department that broke open when the president learned that his campaign was under investigation related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

But weeks after taking office, Mr. Barr released a summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that a judge later called distorted and misleading

And after the election, Mr. Barr opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, authorizing federal prosecutors to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before results were certified.

Mr. Barr soon asked John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to open an investigation into the Russia inquiry itself to seek out any wrongdoing under the Obama administration

Pairing the Durham announcement with that revelation was widely seen as an effort to placate Mr. Trump, who was said to be enraged that Mr. Barr had publicly contradicted him.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Mr. Barr was among the loudest voices warning that mail-in ballots would result in mass election fraud. He routinely claimed in speeches and interviews that the potential for widespread voter fraud was high and posed a grave danger. Mr. Barr’s claims were sometimes false or exaggerated and were widely refuted.

“I don’t have empirical evidence other than the fact that we’ve always had voting fraud. And there always will be people who attempt to do that,” Mr. Barr said in September. He called his conclusions “common sense.”

In October, he secretly appointed Mr. Durham a special counsel assigned to seek out any wrongdoing in the course of the Russia investigation.

Mr. Barr broke his silence a few days later, telling The Associated Press that he had not seen evidence of election fraud on a scale that would have changed the fact that Mr. Biden won.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said.

But the most important, most dangerous part of all this was Trump’s successful attempt to convince millions of his supporters that he’d won and was being cheated out of his win—and the fact that many leaders of the Republican Party, at all levels, went along. That claim is somewhat akin to a charge of child abuse—the very accusation is also a demand for immediate action to stop it. The mob that gathered last Wednesday took that accusation seriously, and acted to “stop the steal.”

There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.

The legislators were there to count the votes certified by the states—after months of review by election officials, and after endless court challenges were rebuffed—and, instead, they voted to throw them out. They did this after months of lying to the public, saying that the election had been stolen. They crossed every line a democracy should hold dear. To my knowledge, not one of them has yet apologized or recanted for their participation in what even some Republican senators are openly calling the “big lie.”

Some, like Senator Ted Cruz, have tried to cover up their attempt to overturn the election by saying that their constituents (and indeed tens of millions of Americans) believe that the election was stolen, and that they were merely honoring their beliefs. However, it was they, along with the president, who convinced those millions of people that the election was stolen in the first place, and that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president-elect

Some legislators have since tried to argue that they didn’t mean to “overturn” the election, that their action was more akin to a protest vote. This cannot be taken seriously. That’s like pulling a gun on somebody, walking away with their wallet, and then claiming that you never intended to shoot them if they hadn’t turned over their wallet.

A mugging is a mugging, and a mass of legislators claiming that the election was stolen and rejecting the results is an attempt to overturn the election. When the president himself refuses to concede, voting against the recognition of electoral votes cannot simply be a protest, and we don’t have to accept such absurdity at face value.

Already, there are signs that many in the GOP intend to respond to their loss in the Senate by doubling down on disenfranchising voters in the name of fighting the “election fraud” they falsely convinced millions is widespread

Today, by contrast, many GOP legislators have claimed for months that the election was fraudulent or stolen, and have explicitly and repeatedly called on their supporters to stop this fraud. The president not only refused to concede before they took their vote, but even as the storming of the Capitol was still under way, he once again claimed that he had won in a landslide.

A great misunderstanding about democracy is that it can be stolen or damaged only if formal rules are suspended or ignored. In fact, many authoritarian regimes are sticklers about formal rules, even as they undermine their meaning

We’ve already witnessed the hollowing out of some of the core tenets of liberal democracy—equal representation of voters, unimpeded access to the ballot—in many aspects of our electoral system. Republicans have pursued a project of minority rule for decades, exploiting structural features of American politics and opportunistically shaping rules in their own favor.

The Senate is structurally dominated by a minority—less than 20 percent of the population elects a majority of its members. Through gerrymandering and the uneven distribution of the population, the GOP does about 6 percent better in the median House district than it does in the national popular vote.

Some Republicans have raised the fact that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, referred to Trump’s presidency as “illegitimate.” That may well be, but that happened long after the election was over and the transition was complete. She called Trump to concede less than 12 hours after the polls closed, and the Obama administration immediately started the transition process. There was no formal challenge that required suspending the session to debate whether to accept the actual results.

The Republicans who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election may have known that it didn’t have a high chance of success, but that doesn’t change the nature of the attempt, especially given their lack of remorse or apology. Unless they are convinced that it was a mistake—unless they pay such a high political price for it that neither they nor anyone else thinks of trying again—they are likely to seize the next available opportunity to do the same. If a future election comes down to one state instead of three, if a future presidential candidate uses lawsuits and coercion more competently, or if a few election officials succumb to threats more easily, they’ll be in the game.

A line must be drawn. The increasing entrenchment of minority rule and democratic backsliding in almost every level of government was terrible enough, but now we’ve even moved past that.

Democrats will soon control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, making it possible for them to undertake crucial reforms on voting rights and electoral integrity. Perhaps some Republicans will decide to join them; if there ever were a time for putting country over party, this is surely it.

Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was “hamstrung” in trying to investigate white nationalists. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,” said Gomez.

The siege of the Capitol wasn’t a departure for Trump, it was an apotheosis. For years, he’s been telling us he wouldn’t accept an election loss. For years, he’s been urging his followers to violence, refusing to condemn their violence, and insinuating that even greater violence was on the way. As he told Breitbart in 2019, in one of his characteristic threats, “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

“We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them,” said President Trump. He urged his minions to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the place where Congress was meeting to certify the election he lost: “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

It is not yet clear who Raskin will be up against. Prominent law firms have refused to represent Trump in his postelection legal fights, and Bloomberg News reports that lawyers who have defended the president in the past don’t want to do so anymore. For four years, as Trump has brought ever more havoc and hatred to this country, many have wondered what it would take to dent his impunity. The answer appears to be twofold: Committing sedition, and losing power.

Trump now becomes the first president in American history to be impeached twice. Half of all presidential impeachments since the Republic began have been impeachments of Trump. This latest impeachment is different than the first, and not just because it was bipartisan. It culminates a week in which Trump has finally faced the broad social pariahdom he’s always deserved.

The House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report quotes, at length, the speech that Donald Trump gave to his devotees on Jan. 6 before many of them stormed the Capitol, baying for execution.

Banks promised to stop lending to him. Major social media companies banned him. One of the Trump Organization’s law firms dropped it as a client. The coach of the New England Patriots rejected the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the P.G.A. pulled its namesake tournament from a Trump golf course. Universities revoked honorary degrees. Some of the country’s biggest corporations, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pledged to withhold donations from congressional enablers of his voter fraud fantasy. Bill de Blasio announced that New York City would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run two ice rinks and other concessions worth millions annually.

Throughout his presidency, Republicans pretended not to hear what the president was saying. For the last few months, Republican election officials in Georgia have spoken with mounting desperation of being barraged with death threats as a result of Trump’s ceaseless lies about the election, but national Republicans did little to restrain him. There was no exodus away from the president and his brand when, during the debates, he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

That is part of the work of the second impeachment. This impeachment may be as much a burden for Democrats as for Republicans; a Senate trial would surely postpone some of the urgent business of the Biden administration. It has gone forward because Democrats had no choice if they wanted to defend our increasingly fragile system of government.

Greene compiled a long list of unhinged comments and social media posts, including endorsement of violence against and assassinations of top Democrats, 9/11 trutherism and denials of school shootings.

Paradoxically, by seeking to punish Trump and Greene, Democrats may actually be helping to perpetuate the cycle of victimhood and complaints about "cancel culture" that each uses to crank up the anger of their radical base.

Greene has seized Trump's mantle by remaining defiant and insisting that she will not apologize for her mistakes in interviews and social media posts

"The entire Marjorie Taylor Greene disaster has been a meteor headed directly at the GOP conference since she won her primary. She should have been put on the bench then," said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. "But the President liked her -- and liked the Q crazies because they liked him. GOP leadership needs to get onto cutting this craziness out of the party or it will proliferate."

Trump has long used the idea of victimhood as an anchor of his appeal to grassroots supporters who feel ostracized from the Washington establishment. In fact, one of the pillars of his defense in his Senate impeachment trial next week will be an argument that Democrats are trying to cancel his right of free speech -- which he used to discredit a fair election and to send a mob to sack the Capitol. That's a message Greene echoed with her mask on Thursday, which read, "Free Speech."

Greene's loss of her committee assignments may actually give her an opportunity to portray her rebuke as the result of standing up to liberals and even "establishment" members of her own party. She has told her supporters she has raised at least $1.6 million during the uproar over the past week.

While just 11 House Republicans voted to remove Greene from her committee assignments Thursday night, 61 voted the night before to remove Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking member of the conference, from her leadership position over her vote to impeach Trump.

Rather than taking full responsibility for her actions in her Thursday speech, Greene said the media that exposed her lies and lunacy is as bad as the QAnon conspiracy theory she espoused. She called Democrats -- rather than Trump's rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6 -- a "mob."

Greene told The Washington Examiner that in removing her from her assignments Democrats "don't even realize they're helping me. I'm pretty amazed at how dumb they are."

"Think of Greene as a virus. Forceful and decisive action has to be taken to prevent the spread,"

Republicans could have taken more forceful action to drive Greene and her radical sentiments from their party at any time in the last few months -- or over the past year when she was running for Congress. Instead, Greene got a standing ovation from many in the House Republican Conference meeting Wednesday night.

The former President on Thursday declined to answer for his seditious behavior, turning down a request by House impeachment managers to testify for his trial.

The furor over Trump and Greene shows that even with the ex-President out of office, most of the Washington GOP is not willing to take issue with the radical fringe that festers among its most loyal voters.

"In the House, I tell you what I think's going on. I think they're trying to play both sides," former Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said on CNN's "The Situation Room" on Thursday. "They don't want to aggravate the people who sort of sign up to QAnon and these conspiracy theories. They don't want to aggravate them but they also want to win the majority. It's all a fight for power."

For many in the party, Trump's unrepentant departure after trying to tear democracy down with false claims of vote fraud and Greene's rocket to fame as a "Make America Great Again" heroine are a nightmare scenario.

"I do think as a party we have to figure out what we stand for, and I think we've got to be a party of ideas and policies and principles and get away from members dabbling in conspiracy theories," South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune told CNN's Manu Raju on Thursday. "I don't think that's a productive course of action or one that's going to lead to much prosperity politically in the future."

"The House Republican Conference has been taken over by QAnon caucus, the crackpot caucus and the conspiracy caucus at the same time," Democratic House Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday night.

"The party of Lincoln is gone. The party of Reagan is gone. The party of John McCain is gone. This is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene."

Pentagon leaders have been concerned Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops as well as civilian law enforcement to quell protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in June.

"Those who suggest that the military would have any role in transition, they are being equally irresponsible," he added, saying "the military should have nothing to do with partisan politics and nothing to do even with any talk of a transition between administrations."

While Trump has not suggested he'd call on the military to decide the election, his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has publicly floated the idea of top military leaders playing a role in ousting Trump should he refuse to leave office following an electoral defeat, a suggestion that drew pushback from Pentagon officials and experts on civilian military relations.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper made the Pentagon's position on the Insurrection Act clear in a June press conference. "The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters.

While the Insurrection Act does empower a president to deploy armed forces in certain situations to restore law and order, some experts believe doing so would be problematic in the event of an electoral dispute.

"While the President could invoke the Act on his own relating to an election dispute, that invocation would be immediately subject to legal challenge and, barring drastic and completely unforeseen circumstances, would be struck down in the courts," Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst, said.

"All this bulls--- about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I've never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I'm the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it," Barr told the Chicago Tribune earlier this month.

"Our laws and history make clear that the military has no formal role in resolving electoral disputes; that job falls in various manifestations to voters, the states, Congress, and the courts, and if there is any need for enforcement of electoral procedures or security, that is the job of civilian law enforcement in the first place, not the military," Honig said.

"It is not entirely certain that the president holds power to declare martial law -- particularly relating to his own election -- and any such attempt by a president almost certainly would be challenged in court and deemed illegal hence, not recognized by the military," Honing said.

"There is the mechanism of governing, I have spoken to our defense leaders about this issue," the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Rep. Adam Smith, told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday.

"No matter what, President Trump is going to be President until January 20.

In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall Thursday, Milley encouraged US troops to remain apolitical.

She also said an aide to Mr. Trump also “instructed her to temporarily withhold any response” to a request from Mr. Bolton to review a chapter on Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine so it could be released during the impeachment trial, wrote Ms. Knight’s lawyer, Kenneth L. Wainstein.

He said that his client had determined in April that Mr. Bolton’s book, “The Room Where It Happened,” no longer contained any classified information, but the “apolitical process” was then “commandeered by political appointees for a seemingly political purpose” to go after Mr. Bolton. The actions she was asked to take were “unprecedented in her experience,” the letter said.

Ms. Knight said that political appointees repeatedly asked her to sign a declaration to use against Mr. Bolton that made false assertions. She said that after her refusal, she was reassigned from the White House despite earlier expectations that she would transition to a permanent position there.

Politically appointed White House officials — led by Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel — called in Ms. Knight for a Saturday meeting in June and challenged her on why she had signed off on large amounts of material that Mr. Ellis claimed was classified, the letter said. By her account, she was able to explain why he was wrong about everything, frustrating them.

Ms. Knight, after extensive work with Mr. Bolton to change his draft to eliminate classified information, had told his team informally in April that it no longer had any unpublishable material. But the White House never sent a formal letter saying the process was over and political appointees in the White House directed Ms. Knight not to communicate with them in writing about the book.

Mr. Wainstein recounted a series of irregularities that he said were unlike any other prepublication review Ms. Knight had handled in her two years working at the National Security Council

Mr. Ellis had no training in the task at the time — he went through it after he completed his review — and pronounced the book replete with still-classified information. The Justice Department adopted that view in court in seeking to block Mr. Bolton from distributing the book.

“The letter strikes me as alleging a very serious infection of the prepublication process by political actors to the detriment of the classification experts who, in any normal administration, would handle these matters based on their experience,” Mr. Geltzer said.

But the White House had by then proceeded to have a politically appointed lawyer — Michael Ellis, a former aide to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and a close Trump ally — conduct his own review of the book.

“It was clear to Ms. Knight that they were trying to get her to admit that she and her team had missed something or made a mistake, which mistake could then be used to support their argument to block publication,” it said. “To their consternation, Ms. Knight was able to explain the clear and objective reasoning behind her team’s decision-making as to each of the challenged passages.”

In the coming days, the letter continued, White House and Justice Department political appointees pressured her over 18 hours of meetings to sign an affidavit they could submit to a court for the litigation against Mr. Bolton that purported to describe her role in the process but was worded in a way that would support their narrative that her review was subpar and had left classified information in the book. She refused.

Ms. Knight — who was nearing the end of a two-year detail from the National Archives and Records Administration to the National Security Council — had expected up to that point that she would transition to a permanent position at the National Security Council. However, following the dispute over the Bolton book, she was instead sent back to the National Archives last month.

n her account of the pressure from Trump aides, Ms. Knight asked the lawyers why they were so insistent on pursuing legal action and speculated that it was “because the most powerful man in the world said that it needed to happen.”

A police union official told the French television station BFM that witnesses had seen the assailant cutting the victim’s throat. The national police were called, officials said, and after having discovered the decapitated victim, confronted the assailant nearby, close to the school. Brandishing a large knife, he threatened the officers, and after refusing to surrender, was shot 10 times, they said.

In the video, the parent details what his daughter told him had transpired in the class.“So this week, he allowed himself to tell them, the Muslims, Muslim students raise your hands,” the parents says. “So they raised their hands, and he said, ‘right, leave the class.’ So my daughter refused to leave and asked him, ‘why?’ And he said he was going to show a photo that would shock them. And then he showed them a naked man, telling them it was the prophet.”

Another parent, Carine Mendes, 41, whose child had attended the class, offered a more nuanced view of what happened. She called the teacher “a very sweet person, in his words, in his expressions.”Ms. Mendes said the teacher had suggested to Muslim students who did not want to see the cartoon that they leave the classroom temporarily, and had asked those who remained not to tell their Muslim classmates about the cartoon in order not to offend their faith.

“He really tried to do things with respect, he didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said.But in a second class where the teacher gave the course, a shocked student refused to leave the room and told her father about what happened. He was the father who later complained in the video posted online.

The next day, the teacher apologized to his students and the principal sent an email message to parents to try to clear up the situation. The teacher’s suggestion to leave the classroom, the principal said, had been insensitive.

“Without wanting to offend anyone, it turned out that by offering this possibility to the students, he still offended the student,” the principal’s email read

Ms. Mendes said that what happened “was awful.”“He was just giving a course on freedom of expression,” she said.

“A teacher was killed just for doing his job,” Sophie Venetitay, a teachers’ union official, told BFM.

South Korea did everything the UK government could have done, but refused to implement. Its death toll so far: 263. It still has an occasional cluster of infection, which it promptly contains. By contrast, the entire UK is now a cluster of infection.

Had the government acted in February, we can hazard a guess about what the result would have been, as the world has conducted a clear controlled experiment: weighing South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand against the UK, the US and Brazil.

The climate modeller James Annan has used his analytical methods to show what would have happened if the UK government had imposed its lockdown a week earlier. Starting it on 16 March, rather than 23 March, his modelling suggests, would by now have saved around 30,000 lives, reducing the rate of illness and death from coronavirus roughly by a factor of five.

While other countries either closed their borders or quarantined all arrivals, in the three months between the emergence of the virus and the UK’s lockdown, 18 million people arrived on these shores, of whom only 273 were quarantined. Even after the lockdown was announced, 95,000 people entered the UK without additional restrictions.

on 12 March, Johnson abandoned both containment and nationwide testing and tracking. A week later, the status of the pandemic was lowered, which meant that the government could reduce the standard of personal protective equipment required in hospitals, and could shift infectious patients into non-specialist care. Again, there was no medical or scientific justification for this decision.

Exercise Cygnus, a pandemic simulation conducted in 2016, found that the impacts in care homes would be catastrophic unless new measures were put in place. The government insists that it heeded the findings of this exercise and changed its approach accordingly. If this is correct, by allowing untested patients to be shifted from hospitals to care homes, while failing to provide the extra support and equipment the homes needed and allowing agency workers to move freely within and between them, it knowingly breached its own protocols. Tens of thousands of highly vulnerable people were exposed to infection.

In other words, none of these are failures of knowledge or capacity. They are de-preparations, conscious decisions not to act.

They start to become explicable only when we recognise what they have in common: a refusal to frontload the costs. This refusal is common in countries whose governments fetishise what we call “the market”: the euphemism we use for the power of money.

Johnson’s government, like that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, represents a particular kind of economic interest. For years politicians of their stripe have been in conflict with people who perform useful services: nurses, teachers, care workers and the other low-paid people who keep our lives ticking, whose attempts to organise and secure better pay and conditions are demonised by ministers and in the media.

This political conflict is always fought on behalf of the same group: those who extract wealth.

The interests of wealth extractors are, by definition, short term. They divert money that might otherwise have been used for investment into dividends and share buybacks.

Years of experience have shown that it is much cheaper to make political donations, employ lobbyists and invest in public relations than to change lucrative but harmful commercial policies

Working through the billionaire press and political systems that are highly vulnerable to capture by money, in the UK, US and Brazil they have helped ensure that cavalier and reckless people are elected.

It’s not that any of these interests – whether the Daily Mail or the US oil companies – want coronavirus to spread. It’s that the approach that has proved so disastrous in addressing the pandemic has been highly effective, from the lobbyists’ point of view, when applied to other issues: delaying and frustrating action to prevent climate breakdown; pollution; the obesity crisis; inequality; unaffordable rent; and the many other plagues spread by corporate and billionaire power.

Thanks in large part to their influence, we have governments that fail to protect the public interest, by design. This is the tunnel. This is why the exits are closed. This is why we will struggle to emerge.

"This is not direction from the current political appointees from the Trump administration, it's from basically the staff below the political level," the staffer said.

"We had a call yesterday and talked quite a bit about this, and the direction we received was to expect a transition, start planning for it, think about the things that the Biden team would likely want to see and start brushing up on those documents and start thinking about how do we frame our programs, and our work in a way that is attractive to the Biden administration," the staffer told CNN.

One Department of Energy division is starting to quietly prepare for the incoming Biden administration even though no official connection has been made, according to one staffer in the department.

until there is a declaration certifying the election, personnel should refrain from speaking directly with members of the Biden team and continue to go through the department's transition office, a department official told CNN.

"They have done everything they can do. Now they just wait," said a source familiar with the process.

department officials realize they have no other option but to remain patient, recognizing that they will eventually get to work with the incoming team, they also believe the department needs a tremendous amount of attention and would like the Biden team to get in as soon as possible.

A Treasury staffer said the Treasury Department has been "running through a standard transition process," which began a month out from the election. That process is ongoing, the source said, though there has been no communication regarding landing teams from the Biden transition yet.

"The silence is still deafening," a DHS official said when asked about outreach from leadership on the transition. The department seems to be in a "wait and see" mode, the official added, saying that any transactions with the Biden team prior to official certification appear "unlikely at this point."

"Much of the story of this last administration and the next couple of months is a disdain for the workings of government," Chertoff said. "It's almost as if it's a determination that they want to wreck government and make it as hard as possible for government to do its job. The problem is that leaves a lot of people dead, as we've seen with the virus."

Trump has refused to accept the outcome, spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud while his campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits that aren't going to overturn the results of the election.

some of Trump's Cabinet officials have stayed loyal to his false claims, suggesting there will be a second Trump term.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."

"Obviously, if there's a transition here, we're going to ensure it's a professional, cooperative one," Azar said.

Biden's team is moving forward with its transition, naming a lengthy team for all of the agencies that is beginning the work of selecting Cabinet leaders and staffing up, even though it is currently shut out from funding -- and the agencies themselves. Biden's team is downplaying the significance the delayed transition will have on the incoming administration.

there are tangible effects to the delay.

Normally, a President-elect would immediately begin receiving the same classified briefings as the President. But so far those briefings have not happened for Biden, as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has not engaged with the Biden team.

While Biden's coronavirus team has been reaching out to states and the medical community to hit the ground running once Biden is inaugurated, the transition team does not have access to the administration's Covid-19 data and virus distribution plans.

"Not only are they not getting access to classified information or already appropriated funds, they aren't getting their review teams into the agencies, and getting ahold of the real budget picture in the agencies and the real personnel picture," said Denis McDonough, who was President Barack Obama's chief of staff.

The office spaces for the transition teams --- both the State Department career officials assigned to the job by the department and the Biden State Department team -- are sitting vacant.

The Biden team is also aware that even when they are able to speak with current defense officials after the General Services Administration signs off on Biden's victory, those officials may not be eager to engage or be as forthcoming as the ones who have already departed.

Christian vaccine refusal not only rejects self-care, it enhances risks to innocent and vulnerable neighbors. Even vaccinated people can catch relatively rare breakthrough cases. And every person—regardless of vaccination status—is vulnerable to the strains placed on a region’s hospitals when COVID runs rampant. 

As a person created in the image of God, taking care of yourself is an independent good. Taking care of yourself so that you can care for others is an even nobler good. 

The balance is clear. It is incumbent on the Christian to take care of themselves, including by taking medicine “in order not to become contaminated” (a nice definition of a vaccine before vaccines were invented). To the extent that he or she takes risks, those risks should be on behalf of others

In addition, my liberty doesn’t extend to materially impairing your ability to pursue happiness.

The idea that liberty has limits is inherent in the American social compact

Through more than two centuries of controversy and progress, our classical liberal legal system is learning to harmonize these three unalienable rights.

I have liberty, yes, but my liberty does not extend to taking or endangering your life

I also fear that the relentless right-wing political focus on religious liberty has obscured two realities—that our liberties have limits when they collide with the rights of others, and that the exercise of our liberty carries with it profound moral responsibility. 

In March I wrote to warn that Christian vaccine hesitancy was a looming national problem. That which we have feared has come to pass. Indeed, as both the geographic concentrations of unvaxxed Americans and the survey data demonstrate, Christian vaccine refusal is helping sustain this pandemic:

Foremost among them are protections for life and health.

By contrast, what does the anti-vax Christian seek? The liberty to risk both the lives of others (through the physical danger of COVID and/or the danger of swamped medical facilities) and their pursuit of happiness (through the continued physical, economic, and social strains of a pandemic extended in part but the choices of anti-vax citizens). 

let’s be honest and clear. The majority of Christians seeking religious exemptions are using religion as a mere pretext for their real concern—be it fear of the shot or the simple desire to do what they want.

I’m quite concerned that long-standing, justified Christian concerns for religious liberty have inadvertently created a sense of religious entitlement that obscures the desperate need for religious responsibility.

For the Christian believer, the pursuit of freedom is inseparable from the pursuit of virtue. We do not seek liberty simply to satisfy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pursue the freedom to make our neighbors sick, we violate the social compact and undermine our moral standing in politics, law, and culture. Christian libertinism becomes a long-term threat to religious liberty itself. 

Our founders recognized the threat of libertinism to liberty. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” In fact, a sufficient degree of vice would, Adams argued, “break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.

The proper framework is easy to articulate, yet hard to create. Take prudent measures to protect yourself. When you choose to take risks, take risks for others. And always recognize that liberty isn’t license. Believers should seek freedom to pursue virtue, not to indulge their desires or appease their fears. 

In more prosaic legal terms, the state is able to regulate even the strongest of liberties when it possesses a “compelling governmental interest” and places those regulations in proper limits

Now is the time to take a clear stand. Not in a way that mocks or condescends, but one can be firm while also being respectful. As the Apostle Paul told Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” The power is not political power, but the power of God over the fears of man. The love is for God and for our neighbor. And sound judgment should help us separate lies from truth and tell us that no argument for liberty should trump our responsibility to spare our nation and our neighbors and finally take the vaccine. 

well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates

These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.

These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ

the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity

I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting

the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”

I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.

The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur

I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.

the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?

My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature

Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.

“Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)

The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”

the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum

The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t

Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.

the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum

Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.

When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.

First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i

Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock

She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.

Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?

Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips

it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.

Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,

In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.

I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience

Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.

I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution

Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation

I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever

Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.

As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”

t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.

Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)

It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.

I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.

the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?

weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?

The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”

Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”

Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened

I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.

In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.

The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design

the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.

The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?

by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?

Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”

(Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.

One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.

This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past

When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.

If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow

One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same

One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society

To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist

To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.

one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”

There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”

“We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”

Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ 

Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.

providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.

Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust

Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings

In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”

These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?

One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism

“many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews

This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.

Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.

One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?

Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.

One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”

The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing

it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.

“It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’

Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?

I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”

Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.

“The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.

Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.

These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week

the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.

In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”

The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.

Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.

Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”

“It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”

Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?

In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i

We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”

These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.

In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism

To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.

Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?

“People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”

“People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”

The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?

I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”

Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

“Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”

perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish

The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”

American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering

But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i

That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.

It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.

How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?

Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism

“Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”

Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”

then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.

Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”

Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.

this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.

The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.

a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?

I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe

There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor

As I wrote in my book, at my most partisan moment I once gave a speech in which I said words that shame me to this day. 

we forget a fundamental truth—our own maladies often make us unable to see the world clearly. Or, as Jesus said, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” In so many ways, we’ve become the People of the Plank, blind to the pain we’ve inflicted on the public even as we try desperately to protect ourselves from them.

Early church fathers were far, far more concerned with the faith and virtue of the church than the maladies of the Romans. 

“I believe the two greatest threats to the United States are university leftists at home and jihadists abroad.”

In Iraq, the reality was so profoundly different that words can barely begin to describe all the distinctions

I didn’t exactly become post-partisan upon my return (that came later), but I gained the perspective that permitted me to start the process of pulling the plank from my own eye.

it’s opened my eyes to many truths that were new to me. Among them, the church should be focused much more on its own virtue than the virtue of the rest of the world.

In addition, if there were no grounds for Christians to live with a “spirit of fear” at the height of the Roman Empire, there are no grounds for us to live with a spirit of fear in our nation today. Yet fear seems to dominate Christian political activism—including fear of the left, of CRT, and sometimes even fear for the very existence of a free church in the United States of America.

sad experience with Christian leaders teaches us that their professed identity tells us little to nothing about their actual virtue, and virtue should be the guiding concern of Christians in politics, not identity. 

I now see that my young desire for “more Christians in politics” and “more respect for Christians in public life” was part of the plank in my eye. Indeed, it helped make me gullible and tribal.

I was often eager to critique secular cultures and slow to respond when my own narratives came under credible attack. 

While some of the most important fights for justice have been led by Christians—including the civil rights and pro-life movements—some of the most destructive political and cultural forces have been loudly and proudly led by Christians as well. 

In fact, two of the most destructive political and cultural movements of this new century—vaccine refusal that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and an effort to overturn an election that could have ruptured our republic—were disproportionately dominated by the most outspoken Christian voices.

Here’s what’s hard. Refusing to lie for a president. Refusing to yield to a mob. Resisting the fury of a furious time. And if Christians can’t succeed in that most basic, though often profoundly dangerous, task, then no, we don’t need more Christians in politics. We need more people who possess and demonstrate character and moral courage.

let’s shift from self-flagellation to prescription

The essence of the humanities’ failure, over the last generation but especially in the internet era, 0c 0cis a refusal to accept that a similar kind of separation is necessary for what the guardians of the liberal arts are trying to preserve.

The quest, understandably enough, has always been to sustain relevance and connection — to politics, to professional life, to whatever trends appear at the cutting edge of fashion, to the idea of progress

But that quest can end only in self-destruction when the thing to which you’re trying so desperately to bind yourself (the culture and spirit of the smartphone-era internet, especially) is actually devouring all the habits of mind that are required for your own discipline’s survival. You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate