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Republicans focused primarily on two politically charged investigations from the Trump era: a federal tax investigation into Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and the work of a special counsel, John H. Durham, to determine whether Obama-era officials erred in 2016 when they investigated Trump campaign officials and their ties to Russia.

Judge Garland has sterling legal credentials, a reputation as a moderate and a long history of service at the Justice Department. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., he worked as a federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington under President George H.W. Bush and was chosen by Jamie Gorelick, the deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, to serve as her top deputy.

Judge Garland was for the most part measured and even-tempered, but he became emotional when he described his family’s flight from anti-Semitism and persecution in Eastern Europe and asylum in America.

While other countries worry that recent layoffs may become permanent, most German workers stayed on the payroll thanks to rapid expansion of the Kurzarbeit, a century-old government system that pays companies to retain employees on shortened hours through temporary crises. Germany was able to expand the Kurzarbeit — and much else in the way of social services — thanks to its famous frugality.

Because Germany went into the pandemic with a government surplus, it could support its locked-down economy with direct payments to families, tax cuts, business loans and other aid amounting to 55 percent of gross domestic product, or roughly four times more than the United States’s rescue package as a share of G.D.P.

The combination of China’s early coronavirus recovery, the catastrophic health and economic situation in the United States, an administration whose “America First” instincts have turned the country inward, and a mostly every-country-for-itself response to the global pandemic has put China in the geopolitical driver’s seat. So far, Beijing has squandered the opportunity in dramatic fashion

The United States, however, should take small comfort in that realization. The underlying dynamics remain: China is pulling out of recession faster than North America and Europe, its military grows stronger each year, and countries in economic doldrums may exit the pandemic more reliant on Chinese capital and markets rather than less so. Chinese leaders believe that the future is theirs, as they pass fractious and declining democracies like the United States on the way up.

America has been lucky that Beijing hasn’t acted with more deftness this time around. The world has experienced a six-month geopolitical vacuum, and China has filled it poorly. What happens next may have less to do with Chinese than American policy. An active, revitalized United States can once again compete effectively with China and resume its role as a global leader. If it does, the past six months could look more like an aberration than a prologue.

he AlphaDogfight contest, coordinated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), shows the potential for AI to take on mission-critical military tasks that were once exclusively done by humans. It might be impossible to write a conventional computer program with the skill and adaptability of a trained fighter pilot, but an AI program can acquire such abilities through machine learning.

But the dogfight contest shows a technological trajectory that may make it difficult to limit the capabilities of autonomous weapons systems in practice. An aircraft controlled by an algorithm can operate with speed and precision that exceeds even the most elite top-gun pilot. Such technology may end up in swarms of autonomous aircraft. The only way to defend against such systems would be to use autonomous weapons that operate at similar speed.

Without an international agreement restricting the development of lethal AI weapons systems, Tegmark says, America’s adversaries are free to develop AI systems that can kill. “We're heading now, by default, to the worst possible outcome,” he says.

US military leaders—and the organizers of the AlphaDogfight contest—say they have no desire to let machines make life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. The Pentagon has long resisted giving automated systems the ability to decide when to fire on a target independent of human control, and a Department of Defense Directive explicitly requires human oversight of autonomous weapons systems.

“The technology is developing much faster than the military-political discussion is going,” says Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, the organization behind the 2015 letter opposing AI weapons.

“One wonders if the vision of a rapid, overwhelming, swarm-like robotics technology is really consistent with a human being in the loop,” says Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington. “There's tension between meaningful human control and some of the advantages that artificial intelligence confers in military conflicts.”

“The kids are completely aligned with this complete distortion and disregard for the truth, whether it’s a conspiracy theory with ‘Obamagate’ or this paedophile comment or the most ridiculous one, that this pandemic is a hoax.

rump’s children have been ever present since he announced his wildly improbable run for the presidency at Trump Tower in New York in June 2015. A year later, Don Jr and Ivanka’s husband, Kushner, were present at a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. It came to nought but raised questions about the methods of both men.

The children clocked up thousands of air miles campaigning while, behind the scenes, Kushner helped shape a crucial digital strategy. The family gathered with Trump on stage in New York when he stunned the world by winning. Since then, their influence has only grown.

‘I learned it by watching you’ Don Jr and Eric stepped in to run the Trump Organization, the family business, where they have been forced to deny persistent allegations they are exploiting the presidency for profit. Both have also come into their own as bomb-throwers on their father’s behalf.

Two years ago, Don Jr separated from his wife, Vanessa, and began dating Guilfoyle, a lawyer, Fox News host and, incongruously, the ex-wife of Gavin Newsom, then the liberal Democratic mayor of San Francisco, now the governor of California. She joined the Trump campaign last year and has proved every bit as zealous as her boyfriend.

In the coronavirus pandemic, the children have hit the ground running in ways Trump and Biden have not. Trump’s re-election team broadcasts live programming online seven nights a week. This week it launched The Right View, including Guilfoyle and Lara Trump, as a riposte to the popular daytime show The View, which has an all-female panel.

“I’m an outdoorsman, shooter, hunter, and not just, ‘I do one weekend a year to talk about it at a cocktail party for the next two years,’” said Don Jr, who has frequently admitted the irony of the son of a New York billionaire speaking on behalf of blue-collar Americans. “This is the way I choose to live my life when I’m not doing my day job.”

Democrats such as Vela, the former Biden adviser, find the Trump children and their partners as offensive as the president himself. “You’ve got to sell your soul if you’re gonna be a part of it,” he said. “It’s almost like a mafioso operation, the mafia of hate. There is so much hate and hatred filled in their bones and in their hearts. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“It’s very disturbing, the extent to which they’re willing to go, and I guess the most chilling example was where Eric said that after the election we’ll find out that the whole Covid pandemic was cooked up by the Democrats. That’s the extent to which they’re willing to bend reality to stand up for their father. It’s also the tragedy of the Republican party that a lot of politicians are in this same position where in order to stay aligned with Trump, they have to bend reality.”

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s a lot of talk about that but I think the stark political reality that will hit them all, whether Donald Trump wins re-election or not, is that there are a whole lot of Republicans waiting in the wings for this administration’s transition to lame duck and they are not going to go quietly into that good night.

many of the questions on which liberals and conservatives share common assumptions have an intimate edge. That is, they touch on core values — how people perceive themselves and their place in the world — more than they do programmatic details of policy. Historically, values debates have the most staying power in American politics

What is the morality of cancel culture?

Justice Louis Brandeis gave his famous answer about the right response to false or wrongheaded political speech: “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Traditional liberals and conservatives are in agreement on the enduring wisdom of that philosophy

Activists to their left and right, by contrast, disagree in detail but agree that in newsrooms, on campuses, on social media, or even during the national anthem at sports stadiums, there is a widening sphere of speech and politically infused gestures that are so offensive they should be suppressed, shamed and punished.

The left agrees with The New York Times’ celebrated 1619 Project, which stated, “Our democracy’s ideas were false when they were written.”

The pro-Trump right and the anti-Trump left are filled with activists who believe institutions have earned their contempt by being fundamentally not on the level — filled with self-dealing elitists

Liberals and conservatives, on the other hand, tend to fret over institutions. They have lots of ideas for how to make them more responsive to their times or improve their reputation. But these are typically incremental in nature and flow from the assumption that a healthy society is animated by respect for institutions, and one animated by contempt is in deep trouble.

The most influential liberals and most influential conservatives in establishment politics typically have reaped those rewards. These winners may wish to expand the number and diversity of people joining in success. But these people typically don’t regard their own success as unmerited, or deserving of confiscatory taxation, or the result of illegitimate structural advantages that should be demolished

Many on the left, in contrast to traditional liberals, do believe that large fortunes are by definition wrong as a matter of public policy.

The argument that expanding the circle of success to include outstanding African Americans — exemplified by Barack Obama’s presidency — had done little to dilute systemic racism as experienced in everyday life for millions of people was gaining power before Trump’s presidency. In 2020 that argument is at the center of national conversation in ways that almost certainly will remain there after Trump leaves office.

Traditional liberals and conservatives often believe that a color-blind society may never be perfectly attained, but it remains the ideal—and one that the country for all its problems is moving ever closer to achieving

Both sides are eager to see institutions sharply challenged, with root-and-branch overhauls — admissions policies transformed, executives taxed or even jailed, monopolies demolished, and so on.

How linked are merit and success?

How broken are American institutions?

“People began to fixate on individual liberties without understanding that one of the most fundamental civil liberties in the US is the right to health – the right to stay alive.”

Demographic data suggests that younger people, between the ages of 18 and 50, are fueling the current wave of infections, accounting for nearly 60% of cases statewide. “Maybe they feel invincible, so they go out to bars, they gather in big groups,” Riley said. “But then they can spread the virus to their grandmas and grandpas, their parents, their buddies with asthma or diabetes, who are more vulnerable.”

Among the hardest-hit regions are rural counties in the south and the Central Valley, where farmworkers have been toilin

The vast majority – more than 90% – of farmworkers in California are Latinx, working in precariously crowded environments. More than 60% of workers involved in food preparation are Latinx as well

Latinx, Black and other minority groups are disproportionately infected with and dying of Covid-19, according to a tracking tool designed by UCLA, and early metrics suggest that the state’s reopening has exacerbated disparities. Devastating outbreaks in California’s prisons and homeless shelters have further fueled inequities.

the state rushed its reopening plan. Initially, officials had set two weeks of declining as a benchmark for advancing through each phase of reopening. “We wanted to not only flatten the curve but see a downturn,” he said. “Then we began seeing the anti-lockdown protests, basically egged on with a wink and a nod from Donald Trump, and the governor faced increasing pressure to move faster.”

the governor’s recent orders pausing the California’s reopening, and his statewide mandate requiring residents to wear masks, are laudable, he said. “Still, we’re only successful if people follow the order – and right now, they’re not doing it.”

At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”

As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families

The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.

That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease

s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.

What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.

The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken.

even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat.

In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward

What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years

The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?

Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.

Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.

One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”

“It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”

When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response

The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.

The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.

There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.

The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.

Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself

“It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”

What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.

Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.

Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.

When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.

In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.

Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”

Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.

In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher

Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.

Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.

other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.

However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.

Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.

A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.

Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:

Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none

If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.

Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.

Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.

the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”

In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.

This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.

It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.

“The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”

Chinese scientists have even submitted a paper for publication to the Lancet – although it has not yet been peer-reviewed – that claims “Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human Sars-CoV-2 transmission first happened”, suggesting instead that the first case may have been in the “Indian subcontinent”.

Claims that the virus had origins outside China are given little credence by western scientists. Michael Ryan, director of the health emergencies programme at the World Health Organization (WHO), said last week that it would be “highly speculative” to argue that the disease did not emerge in China. “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he told a news briefing in Geneva.

Reports of Covid circulating in Italy in autumn 2019, based on samples from a cancer unit, seem “weak”, said Prof Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “The serological data [from Italy] can most likely be explained by cross-reactive antibodies directed against other coronaviruses.” In other words, antibodies found in the cases in Italy had been triggered in individuals who had been infected by different coronaviruses, not those responsible for Covid-19

And while traces of coronavirus have been found on frozen food packaging, scientists think that represents a very low risk for a disease now believed to be overwhelmingly transmitted through respiratory droplets.

A positive test “doesn’t indicate infectious virus, just that some signal from the virus is present on that surface,” Andrew Pekosz of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University told AP. “I’ve seen no convincing data that Sars-CoV-2 on food packaging poses a significant risk for infection.”

But as the human and economic toll of the pandemic mounts, Beijing is keen to protect its reputation at home and abroad. Covid-19 has now infected over 60 million people and killed nearly 1.5 million.

“China is still struggling to deal with the fact that it is held responsible for the “original sin” of the outbreak, which undercuts virtually every effort to salvage its image,” said Andrew Small, a China scholar and senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, a US thinktank.

“Recent months have shown what a catastrophic impact the pandemic has had for China in international public opinion.”

He does not think there is any doubt in the minds of senior Chinese leadership about the origin of the virus, and sees the focus on reporting possible alternative origins as a propaganda campaign.

The reports fit an internal narrative of a strong China led by an efficient Communist party. Domestically, Beijing has promoted its enormous success in virtually eradicating the disease and returning life within its borders to something like normal

Internationally, China’s aims probably include introducing some doubt for global audiences who are likely to believe it, turning basic facts into a “contested, politically sensitive matter” in relations with Beijing, Small said.

China’s questioning of the origin of the virus in Wuhan might be more credible if it was supporting an independent investigation into the disease, but instead authorities have repeatedly proved obstructive

WHO investigators who visited Wuhan earlier this year were not able to visit the food market linked to the initial outbreak. A new team is expected to head to China soon to build on initial work by a Chinese team, but they still don’t have a date for travel, with the WHO saying only that they will travel “in due time”.

the political veteran had been scheduled to moderate the second debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden

the president criticised Scully, calling him a "Never Trumper"

Republicans who refused to vote for Mr Trump in the 2016 election

"@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump."

Scully said he had sent the tweet "out of frustration"

after "relentless criticism" regarding his role as moderator, including from President Trump.

Soon after Scully's suspension was announced, Mr Trump responded to the news, heralding his own "good instincts".

Scully has led the network's presidential election coverage for nearly 30 years and has developed a reputation for balanced coverage.

whose expensive self-empowerment courses were taken by Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes and top business school graduates. Many people joined Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ee-um) hoping it would help them overcome their insecurities and give them a sense of purpose.

Those women, who were called “slaves,” were branded with his initials near their pelvises and assigned to have sex with him. They adhered to strict diets, restricted to as low as 500 calories a day. They were required to hand over collateral, including photos of their genitals that they feared would be released if they disobeyed orders.

Prosecutors charged him with racketeering, applying a statute that had been used to dismantle the major Mafia families in New York. The jury found him guilty of crimes that included child pornography, forced labor, sex trafficking, identity theft and obstruction of justice.

He is trying to create a podcast about his case and set up a contest to find errors in his prosecution in exchange for a $25,000 cash prize, according to court filings.

Membership in Nxivm, whose courses were thousands of dollars apiece, was by invitation only. As the curriculum progressed, Mr. Raniere used psychological manipulation to indoctrinate his followers into total obedience, former members have said.

Prosecutors have said in court papers that Mr. Raniere deserves a life sentence, a punishment that is typically reserved for cases involving deaths or murders.

Still, federal prosecutors have said Mr. Raniere’s unwillingness to accept responsibility and his contempt for his victims demonstrated that a life sentence was the only way to stop him from hurting more people.

After Daniela developed feelings for another man, Mr. Raniere threatened to deport her back to Mexico unless she confined herself to a room, according to trial testimony. She stayed in the room for almost two years, an experience that pushed her to the brink of suicide, she said.

Many of his supporters had careers at prominent finance, consulting and law firms.

The Islamic Prophet Muhammad started preaching a monotheistic faith called Islam in his hometown of Mecca from 610 CE onwards.

Equality, egalitarianism, equal rights for women (who had been hitherto considered “property” by the Meccans), and the prospect of heaven attracted many towards Islam.

Despite putting forth strict persecution of the new religion and its preacher, Meccans failed to contain the Muslim community.

Medina offered Prophet Muhammad sovereignty over the city, making him the first ruler and king (r. 622-632 CE) of what was later to become the Islamic or Muslim Empire. The city-state of Medina soon came into conflict with Mecca, and the latter was conquered, after years of warfare, in 629/630 CE.

At the morrow of Prophet Muhammad’s death, the Islamic Empire slid to the brink of disintegration, as many advocated pre-Islamic home-rule system. This threat, however, was averted when Abu Bakr (r. 632-634 CE) proclaimed himself the Caliph of the Prophet and the first supreme ruler of the Islamic realm.

Abu Bakr now sought to expand his realm beyond the Arabian Peninsula. The Muslim Empire bordered two superpowers: the Byzantine Empire (330-1453 CE) and Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE) to the north-west and north-east respectively. These two colossal powers often clashed violently in prolonged wars, had exhausted their resources, and severely repressed Arabian tribes living in the Middle East in the course of pursuing ultimate power. For Abu Bakr, this was an opportune moment, although he may not have known that.

Never content with wasting an opportunity, the Caliph sent Khalid, who had now distinguished himself as a war hero, to raid Iraq (633 CE). The duo stuck to the western side of the Euphrates, where they enjoyed much success, employed eager locals in their ranks, and countered Sassanian advances towards the conquered territory.

Abu Bakr died in 634 CE, and his successor Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634-644 CE) took charge as the second caliph of the Islamic Empire and the "commander of the faithful". Caliph Umar reinforced the Iraqi front with fresh troops under the command of a reputable companion of the Prophet: Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas (l. 595-674 CE).

With this defeat, Sassanian control over Iraq was shattered, the Rashidun troops soon swept over the land and even took Ctesiphon – the Persian capital, ironically located far off from their power base in Khorasan, the eastern province – located in modern-day Iran.

Umar’s successor Uthman (r. 644-656 CE) continued the military expansion undertaken by his predecessors. Yazdegerd III, who had escaped to the eastern parts of his kingdom, was murdered by a local at Merv in 651 CE.

Abu Bakr sent four divisions under Shurahbil ibn Hasana (l. 583-639 CE), Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan (d. 640 CE), Amr ibn al-As (l. c. 573-664 CE), and Abu Ubaidah (l. 583-639 CE) to raid Syria and the Levant.

The Rashidun forces continued to advance northwards in the Levant and Syria. They took Damascus in 634 CE, either through an assault or treason, defeated the Palestinian imperial division in the Battle of Fahl (Pella; 635 CE).

Honed for their shipbuilding skills, the Syrians were employed to create a formidable Rashidun fleet to challenge Byzantine authority in the Mediterranean. After defeating the Byzantine fleet attempting to retake Alexandria (646 CE), the Muslims went on the offensive. Cyprus fell in 649 CE, followed by Rhodes in 654 CE, and in 655 CE, the Byzantine naval authority was crushed with a victory at the Battle of the Masts. Muslims held uncontested control over the Mediterranean and sent raiding parties as far as Crete and Sicily.

At its peak, the realm of the Rashidun Caliphate spread from parts of North Africa in the west to parts of modern-day Pakistan in the east; several islands of the Mediterranean had also come under their sway.

The Byzantines and Sassanians were superpowers of their time but years of warfare had weakened the two colossal titans

Moreover, Arabs were never expected to pose any threat to them, these disunited desert dwellers did not have the numbers or the will to face an empire. This, however, changed as the Arabian Peninsula was united under the banner of Islam by 633 CE. Freed from the infighting that had plagued them for centuries, the Arabs directed their potential towards their neighbors. They considered a just war as a holy struggle and if death was to embrace them, they would be immortalized as martyrs.

Such a strong resolve, however, was lacking in their foes. Both empires employed mercenaries, and these men did not feel similar passion for their client state as the Arabs did for the Caliphate. Moreover, a multiethnic army lacked the coherence imparted by a single faith and unified national sentiment, but perhaps the most destructive penalty that these empires faced was because of how they treated their people in their provinces.

In the homestretch before the election, Mr. Trump has overridden many of the remaining safeguards against bad deals, and ignores his professional advisers even more often. He is pulling out all the stops to rack-up last-minute wins before the November election

Even worse, the uncertainty means that Americans themselves cannot know, or trust, all the deals being made in their name. Although Mr. Trump will spend the remaining weeks of the campaign talking about some deals and denying others, the true extent of his corruption of American foreign policy will not be known for many years.

If Mr. Trump manages to stay in the White House, he’ll believe he has a mandate for more of this kind of deal-making. Re-election will remove the last remaining guardrail against the corruption of American foreign policy and drive anyone who seeks to avert disaster underground or out of government. It’s impossible to predict the damage to America’s interests, power, credibility, relationships and reputation.

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations

In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.

Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.

Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products

Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp.

As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum

Facebook’s dominance is not an accident of history. The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved

The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.

Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had any meaningful revenue, but both were incredibly popular. The Instagram acquisition guaranteed Facebook would preserve its dominance in photo networking, and WhatsApp gave it a new entry into mobile real-time messaging.

When it hasn’t acquired its way to dominance, Facebook has used its monopoly position to shut out competing companies or has copied their technology.

In 2014, the rules favored curiosity-inducing “clickbait” headlines. In 2016, they enabled the spread of fringe political views and fake news, which made it easier for Russian actors to manipulate the American electorate.

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon)

I don’t blame Mark for his quest for domination. He has demonstrated nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur

It’s on our government to ensure that we never lose the magic of the invisible hand. How did we allow this to happen

a narrow reliance on whether or not consumers have experienced price gouging fails to take into account the full cost of market domination

It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.

It is a disservice to the laws and their intent to retain such a laserlike focus on price effects as the measure of all that antitrust was meant to do.”

Facebook is the perfect case on which to reverse course, precisely because Facebook makes its money from targeted advertising, meaning users do not pay to use the service. But it is not actually free, and it certainly isn’t harmless.

We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap.

The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.

The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them.

What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.

In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would favor non-news content shared by friends and news from “trustworthy” sources, which his engineers interpreted — to the confusion of many — as a boost for anything in the category of “politics, crime, tragedy.”

As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.

No one at Facebook headquarters is choosing what single news story everyone in America wakes up to, of course. But they do decide whether it will be an article from a reputable outlet or a clip from “The Daily Show,” a photo from a friend’s wedding or an incendiary call to kill others.

Mark knows that this is too much power and is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control

Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.

In an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in March, he wrote, “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree.” And he went even further than before, calling for more government regulation — not just on speech, but also on privacy and interoperability, the ability of consumers to seamlessly leave one network and transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.

I don’t think these proposals were made in bad faith. But I do think they’re an attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company. Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules. It’s afraid of an antitrust case and of the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.

We don’t expect calcified rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate drug companies, health care companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market works for the public good. In these cases, we all understand that government isn’t an external force meddling in an organic market; it’s what makes a dynamic and fair market possible in the first place. This should be just as true for social networking as it is for air travel or pharmaceuticals.

Just breaking up Facebook is not enough. We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies. Its first mandate should be to protect privacy.

First, Facebook should be separated into multiple companies. The F.T.C., in conjunction with the Justice Department, should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years.

How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.

Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared. But the cost of entering the social network business is not that high. And unlike with pipes and electricity, there is no good argument that the country benefits from having only one dominant social networking company.

others worry that the breakup of Facebook or other American tech companies could be a national security problem. Because advancements in artificial intelligence require immense amounts of data and computing power, only large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon can afford these investments, they say. If American companies become smaller, the Chinese will outpace us.

The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.

But the biggest winners would be the American people. Imagine a competitive market in which they could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit

The cost of breaking up Facebook would be next to zero for the government, and lots of people stand to gain economically. A ban on short-term acquisitions would ensure that competitors, and the investors who take a bet on them, would have the space to flourish. Digital advertisers would suddenly have multiple companies vying for their dollars.

The Europeans have made headway on privacy with the General Data Protection Regulation, a law that guarantees users a minimal level of protection. A landmark privacy bill in the United States should specify exactly what control Americans have over their digital information, require clearer disclosure to users and provide enough flexibility to the agency to exercise effective oversight over time

The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.

Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media

We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence.

These are difficult challenges. I worry that government regulators will not be able to keep up with the pace of digital innovation

I worry that more competition in social networking might lead to a conservative Facebook and a liberal one, or that newer social networks might be less secure if government regulation is weak

Professor Wu has written that this “policeman at the elbow” led IBM to steer clear “of anything close to anticompetitive conduct, for fear of adding to the case against it.”

Finally, an aggressive case against Facebook would persuade other behemoths like Google and Amazon to think twice about stifling competition in their own sectors, out of fear that they could be next.

The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.

This movement of public servants, scholars and activists deserves our support. Mark Zuckerberg cannot fix Facebook, but our government can.

Instead of building on this goodwill and solidarity, the US launched a War on Terror, the greatest strategic disaster in its history. Thus, the US squandered an historic opportunity to undo the harm of its Cold War policies, which had led to the emergence of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States – victor of the Cold War and last superpower standing – suddenly looked vulnerable and sympathetic. Outsiders felt pity but also a sly hope that, after decades of running the world clumsily at arm’s length, the Americans might recalibrate and become a humbler nation.

The War on Terror was a war of choice, not necessity. What if the US had used 9/11 as a catalyst to bring about transformative change in its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, rather than doubling down by invading Afghanistan and Iraq? It could have used its soft and hard power to help resolve regional conflicts and invest in human development, making the world safer and more prosperous. 

‘The world continues to get America wrong’ Tim Stanley, Historian, columnist and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph

The War on Terror was costly in blood and reputation. The so-called leader of the free world sanctioned torture and illegally invaded Iraq, destroying a state and creating a vacuum that allowed the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS. With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom.

The opposite was perceived to happen: America became more like itself, proud, unilateral, dispensing vigilante justice with a cowboy president (‘some folks look at me and see a certain swagger’, joked George W. Bush, ‘which in Texas is called walking’).

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq looked like repeats of Vietnam: enrolment in US history courses in the UK took off as students, like me, wanted to understand why America kept making the same mistakes.

‘That Southeast Asia became the “second front” in the War on Terror was a blunder based on bad intelligence’ Minh Bui Jones, Editor of Mekong Review

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I found myself in Washington DC talking to a well-known author on the legacy of the terrorist attacks. At one point he asked me about Islamic terrorism in Cambodia, where I was living at the time. The question startled me. In the seven years I lived there, I never thought of Islam and terrorism together.

That author’s question tells you one thing about 9/11 in relation to Southeast Asia. Mostly, it is paranoia wrapped in ignorance. There are about 300,000 Muslims living in Cambodia today, a little more than one per cent of the population.

That this region became the ‘second front’ in George W. Bush’s great ‘War on Terror’ – his administration sent 660 troops to the Philippines in January 2002, following the capture of al-Qaeda operatives in Singapore and Malaysia – was a strategic blunder based on bad intelligence. Of course, Cambodians and their Vietnamese neighbours know all too well where those sorts of mistakes can lead and they would have felt a sense of déjà vu as they watched US bombs raining on Afghanistan and Iraq

Growing up in Vietnam in the 1970s, I had an image of the US as impregnable and I wasn’t alone. After 9/11, it looked vulnerable; I’m sure I’m not alone here either.

‘As US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, history threatens to repeat itself’ Elisabeth Leake, Associate Professor of International History at the University of Leeds and author of Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2022)

In the aftermath of 9/11, the US led an ultimately failed invasion of Afghanistan that lacked a historical understanding of the state or its inhabitants. American policy planners and military officers seemed destined to repeat mistakes made by other foreign powers in the decades before them. This was not a case of the ‘graveyard of empires’ – itself an inappropriate moniker – striking again. Rather, it was a ready willingness to overlook Afghanistan’s complicated 20th-century history.

social scientists supported military personnel in comprehending supposedly incomprehensible Afghanistan. These policies fundamentally overlooked Afghanistan’s complex social and political relations and the dynamic ways Afghan elites and intellectuals had engaged with the international arena for decades. The US itself had fostered some of this modernisation in the era of Cold War competition, yet 21st-century narratives replaced a history of internationalism with a history of parochialism. 

On Facebook, you have to endure anonymous abuse of this nature with absolutely no recourse other than to hit the “report” button and hope that some community standards drone, somewhere, suspends the offending account for a couple days.

In a real town square, you can see people’s faces and usually you know them already.

On Facebook, you’re dumped into a group of “friends” you’ve never met, or interacted with—many of whom might not even be actual human beings. And the only help you get in determining social context is a combination of text, emojis, and gifs.

On Facebook, you may be arguing with hired Russian trolls who are actively employed by Vladimir Putin to sow discord in the world.

In a real town square, if someone claims they plan to assault you and your family you can punch their physical face with your physical fist.

In a real town square, you can fit, at most, a few hundred people. If you’re in the square of a giant, world-historic city in Russia or China, you might be able to squeeze in 600,000 people. On Facebook, you have . . . everyone on planet Earth!

In a real town square, people who insist that COVID vaccines are filled with mind control nanobots and that the Jews are enslaving children are relegated to the fringes.

Facebook follows you everywhere—like a psychotic ex. It’s always hiding in the bushes and you have no choice but to wonder what the heck it’s up to right now,

In a real town square, if the entire town became convinced that their mayor is the Christ risen and decided that they needed to stockpile AK-47s in preparation for the apocalypse then visitors to the town would quietly leave (and warn the authorities).

On Facebook, those folks get a guest pass to every other Town Square—again in the world—and are free to go around preaching their lunacy to others without being constrained by space, time, or economics.

In a real town square, the town doesn’t benefit financially by attracting the stupidest/craziest/most pernicious townfolk to the soapbox and then doing everything in their power to make sure the residents of the town are afraid to leave the square for fear of missing something truly terrible.

Facebook makes approximately all its money by getting you to rubber-neck through your day as you slow-roll past trainwreck after trainwreck.

In the real world, the Town Square stays (as the name suggests) in TOWN!

On Facebook, they are brought together into powerful collectives, afforded megaphones, and algorithmically ushered into everyone’s sphere of influence to corrupt otherwise rational and healthy discourse.

But in fairness, there is one aspect of the town square metaphor where Facebook is a pretty decent facsimile of the real thing. It’s the one where we used to drag innocent people to a gallows, accuse them of something completely insane, like “witchcraft,” and then either ruin or end their lives.

Facebook is pretty good at that because its fortunes are made by making sure that you keep coming back—it doesn’t matter if you’re sharing pics of kitties, contributing to a genocide, or part of an angry mob that’s destroying someone’s livelihood or reputation on some fanciful whim.

What’s another real-world concept where a private unregulated enterprise gets to make a fortune running psychological experiments on the population of the world, which leads to a slow collapse of civil and civic order and drives everyone insane? I’m actually drawing a blank—but it sure as hell isn’t a “town square.”

Officials are told that they serve a rising China, whose growing strength is the awe of the world

Chaguan recently spent four days in Malipo, a remote county of conical, cloud-topped hills, terraced fields and fruit orchards in the southern province of Yunnan, on the border with Vietnam

The ministry uses its connections to help the county, which was declared free of extreme poverty in 2019 and last year recorded an average income per person of 11,984 yuan ($1,874).

Foreign embassies and businesses have donated school buildings, books and scholarships. On October 17th America’s National Basketball Association donated a new basketball court to a middle school in Malipo (the NBA is still trying to mend fences in China after a coach signalled support for Hong Kong’s democrats, triggering nationalist fury).

A new motorway opened on October 1st, following lobbying by the foreign ministry. A diplomatic charity raised funds to build clean water systems for villagers who previously fetched water by hand.

the ministry sends a mid-ranking official to serve for a year or two as Malipo’s deputy county chief.

Domestic tasks also loom. The ministry’s current man in Malipo, Chen Minghuang, served in Japan for several years. In addition to seeking inward investments for the county, he is, among other things, responsible for water quality in several rivers.

local official praises foreign-ministry volunteers for their promotional skills.

“Compared with the masses, party members represent more progressive and developed forces. That’s how they can help the people,” says the visitor from Beijing. A years-long anti-corruption drive has created a culture of honesty among officials of all ranks, she adds

Farmers may not understand which crops will grow well, and which will make money, says a county official. The role of experts is to guide them to harness market forces.

Lots of officials are increasingly proud of the system they serve, especially as they survey what they regard as chaos in the West.

they talk openly about the party’s role in that system. As Mr Chen puts it, millions of party members are working towards the same goals, guided by strong leaders.

changing views of Malipo’s masses as they see their roads being paved, and houses and schools restored. “The central government always enjoyed a high status in people’s minds. Now local government’s reputation has also risen,” Mr Chen says.

He entered politics to advocate for traditional or socially conservative beliefs. “He glowed with certain passions—outlawing abortion, preserving family values, fighting bureaucrats on behalf of the little guy—that could not be championed in the stables,” Alberta writes. McBroom stated his position on gun ownership in 2012: “The Second Amendment guarantees our rights to own firearms[,] and I stand strongly for that correct interpretation.”

The American Conservative Union gave McBroom the best marks of any Michigan state senator—voting in line with the organization’s position 95 percent of the time—in 2019, the most recent year of data. By the old rules of political communication, no one is more qualified to be a “credible messenger” to the right-of-center voters of the U.P. than Ed McBroom.

last month, McBroom and three of his senate colleagues—two of them Republicans, only one a Democrat—released their report, and it “crackled with annoyance at certain far-flung beliefs,” writes Alberta:

His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed

thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense. “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” McBroom wrote in the report. “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.” For good measure, McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

“McBroom said he is not fazed by the criticism or the prospect of a primary challenge, which he was already expecting,” notes the Michigan Bridge. “I’ve been totally honest and up front, and if (voters) judge that’s not what they want, and if the majority of them want a different course of action, that’s okay,” he told that publication.

Yet despite three of the four senators who wrote the election report being Republicans; and despite McBroom’s ideological reputation, the product of a decade in Michigan’s state legislature (he was a state rep from 2010 to 2018), and the familiarity of the McBroom family name, and McBroom’s culturally Christian values—despite all that, his political standing is still taking a hit.

Trump trashed McBroom and the state senate president, Republican Mike Shirkey. He published their office phone numbers. He urged people to “vote them the hell out of office.”

more to the point about credible messengers is this: McBroom said that he’s felt heat from people he knows—allies of his—not just randos on social media. “It’s been very discouraging, and very sad, to have people I know who have supported me, and always said they respected me and found me to be honest, who suddenly don’t trust me because of what some guy told them on the internet,” he told Alberta.

So thorough were the authors’ conclusions that they recommended “the [state] attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County,” where an obvious and brief reporting error showed Biden thumping Trump, “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

What McBroom clarified is this:

Trump’s base is the animating force of the Republican party, which holds GOP officials accountable mostly for their accountability to Trump. To this group, there is no such thing as a credible critic of the former president.

the unanswered question that confronts coalition-builders today is how to reach a movement for which all reasoning is motivated reasoning; for which facts and proof are subjective

The ideas that seized the imagination of millions had deep and diverse intellectual roots. For example, the mid-20th century thinker Sayyid Qutb mounted a comprehensive critique of the soulless materialism of America, tracing it in part to the separation of church and state — the fatal error, he believed, that divided the spirit from the flesh. In the Muslim world, he argued, body and soul should not be split asunder, but should live united in a resurrected caliphate, governed by Shariah law.

If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13 percent had a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda.

In his 2011 book, “The Missing Martyrs,” Charles Kurzman showed that fewer than one in every 100,000 Muslims had become an Islamist terrorist in the years since 9/11. The vast majority rejected the enterprise.

When political Islamists tried to establish theocratically influenced rule in actual nations, their movement’s reputation was badly hurt. In one of extremism’s most violent, radical manifestations, the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria became a blood-drenched nightmare.

even in more moderate places, political Islam is losing favor. In 2019, The Economist surveyed the data and concluded, “Across the Arab world people are turning against religious political parties and the clerics who helped bring them to power.

Many appear to be giving up on Islam, too.” Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi of Iran noticed the trend in his own country: “Iranians are evading religious teachings and turning to secularism.”

Globally, terrorism is down. Deaths from attacks fell by 59 percent between 2014 and 2019. Al Qaeda’s core members haven’t successfully attacked the U.S. homeland since 9/11. In 2017, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, began a process of marginalizing radical Wahhabism.

“most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from the glory days of Al Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the ‘near enemy’ (the local regimes) but rather the ‘far enemy’ (the United States and the West more broadly).”

it’s obvious that even local conflicts can create incredible danger. But the idea of global glory — a fundamental shaking of the world order — that burst on the world stage roughly 40 years ago has been brought low.