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Using incendiary and dehumanizing language to refer to his opponents, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said Saturday

Mr. Trump accused Democrats and President Biden of trying to roll back his efforts to expand veteran access to health care, causing soaring inflation, pushing the country to the brink of World War III, endangering the troops in Afghanistan and of lying and rigging elections.

the Lost Cause was far more than a military narrative. It provided a comprehensive account of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. The conflict, in this telling, had little to do with slavery, but instead was caused, depending on which book you read, by the protective tariff, arguments over states’ rights, or white southerners’ desire for individual liberty. Confederate soldiers were defeated not by superior generalship or greater fighting spirit but by the Union’s advantages in manpower, resources, and industrial technology.

And the nation’s victory was marred by what followed: the era of Reconstruction, portrayed as a time of corruption and misgovernment, when the southern white population was subjected to the humiliation of “Negro domination.” This account of history was easily understandable and, like all ideologies, most convincing to those who benefited from it—proponents of white supremacy.

After the war, Longstreet had emerged as a singular figure: the most prominent white southerner to join the Republican Party and proclaim his support for Black male suffrage and officeholding. Leading the biracial Louisiana militia and the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, he also battled violent believers in white supremacy.

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

Israel’s war with Hamas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have made the world a more “scary and unpredictable” place than at any other time since the Second World War, Dimon contended. “Here in the US, we continue to have a strong economy,” he said. “We still have a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the system. But these geopolitical matters are very serious — arguably the most serious since 1938.

What’s happening ... right now is the most important thing for the future of the world — freedom, democracy, food, energy, immigration. We diminish that importance when you say, ‘What’s it going to do to the market?’ Markets will be fine. Markets can deal with stuff. Markets go up and down. Markets fluctuate.”

That said, the conflict in the Middle East — in which at least 1,400 Israelis have been murdered and 9,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 — has rattled a financial system already gulping at the prospect of inflation proving sticky and interest rates staying higher for longer. The region accounts for 48 per cent of global energy reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil last year. Previous crises, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, resulted in big price shocks — although so far, at about $86 a barrel, oil has roughly returned to its pre-October 7 level, while gas prices have risen only slightly.

mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.

During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.

I’ll be celebrating Dec. 15, the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. The longstanding designation was based on prejudice, not medical research, and the revision marked the beginning of the end for so-called conversion therapy, which sought to “cure” gays and lesbians of a nonexistent malady.

Half a century later, the medical establishment is pushing a new kind of conversion therapy under the guise of transgender identity. No one is suffering more than gay kids

In Canada, where I practice, and in the U.S., physicians provide what’s euphemistically known as “gender-affirming care” to patients as young as 8, and the leading transgender health association has opened the door to interventions at even earlier ages. Under this framework, those who feel uncomfortable with their bodies may receive a medical regimen including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries. These interventions typically stunt, remove or irreversibly modify a patient’s sexual development, genitals and secondary sex characteristics

The cargo of Iranian oil was then handed over to the United States for being in violation of American sanctions that ban Iran from selling its oil, according to Iranian news media, a claim that could not be independently verified.

Iranian oil and energy experts said Iran’s seizure of the ships was a signal to Washington that Iran would toughen its stance if the Biden administration returned to Trump-era policies of maximum pressure and began seizing tankers and crude oil cargo belonging to Iran.

Greece’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Iran’s actions on Friday were “tantamount to acts of piracy” and would have a negative impact on Iran-Greece relations, as well as Iran’s relations with the European Union, of which Greece is a member. It advised its citizens not to travel to Iran.

The Biden administration said on Wednesday it would cut in half the amount it charges companies to build wind and solar projects on federal lands, a move designed to encourage development of renewable energy.

“Clean energy projects on public lands have an important role to play in reducing our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and lowering costs for families,”

The new policy would cut those costs by about 50 percent,

in the past decade or so, human rights have pretty much disappeared from our politics. Throughout the 9/11 wars, the grotesque contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of tortured prisoners, civilian casualties, and grinding conflict corrupted the cause beyond remedy

After Iraq and Afghanistan, no president can send young men and women to war by invoking human rights. When Barack Obama refrained from punishing Bashar al-Assad of Syria for murdering thousands of innocent people with poison gas, there was no outcry from the general public.

With the eclipse of U.S. prestige and power, the decay of liberal democracy, and the rising appeal of authoritarian regimes, there’s no longer any mechanism—neither military force nor threat of sanctions and isolation, nor global pressure campaigns by civil-society groups—to make the world’s dictators hesitate before they throw people into concentration camps.

Russia’s escalation of its eight-year war against Ukraine presents a choice about what role America would like to play in the world.

should the United States conduct itself as a great power, and, if so, should it be a European power or restrict itself to preserving the order in Asia.

Before the end of World War II, American statesmen began to think about what world order should look like after the war. They designed a global order to mirror four tenets of the American regime at home: commerce, law, liberalism, and guns.

What do these examples have in common? As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are “nasty, brutish and short,” if they participate in a “commonwealth” — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure.

Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.

Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health, when they can; but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action

social media gave the revolution a “spirit for destruction.” The constant push for attention, the purity spiraling in which each activist had to prove himself more loyal to the revolution than any other, the disdain for the compromises of politics or the hard work of organizing—the coalition’s problems all seemed to extend from the culture of highly public platforms.

a tool such as this one provides the opportunity to build what Zeynep Tufekci in her book, Twitter and Tear Gas, calls “network internalities”: all those deep relationships that help any movement survive through hardships

Facebook or Twitter is social in the way a large cocktail party is, where you move from one conversation to the next, only half-hearing most of what is said, and where the loudest voice or funniest joke grabs everyone’s attention

On Sunday, Serbia's president Aleksandar Vucic announced that his country had agreed to a new three-year gas supply deal with Russia's state energy provider, Gazprom. 

The news came at an awkward time, and in doing so, Vucic created a fresh headache for the Western anti-Putin alliance and, notably, for the European Union. 

The EU is set on expanding to the east and sees the Western Balkans as key to European security -- even more so in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year.

The book was about how women can make it to the top. It was a sort of “work-life balance” category buster, because she was telling women to pretty much forget about the “life” part.

when I looked through the galley, the whole thing was so manufactured and B-school-ish that I just wanted to put my head on the keyboard and have a little nap.

The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the White House.”

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said that Gerald Ford, Carter’s predecessor and close friend, was the first to fully take advantage of those high-paid post-presidential opportunities, but that “Carter did the opposite.”

Since Ford, other former presidents, and sometimes their spouses, routinely earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech.

The outgoing chair of the Institute of Race Relations has decried the widespread use of “nonsense” unconscious bias training, claiming it is an obvious sidestepping of tackling racial injustice.

In a wide-ranging interview, the sociologist and cultural activist said he was proud of the role that his institute had played in putting institutional racism on the national agenda several decades ago, but was dismayed at the rise of terms such as unconscious bias.

“We made arguments to the state even when we’re on platforms alongside them saying this was nonsense. It’s racism we want to talk about, it’s systemic behaviour we want to talk about, institutionalised racism we want to talk about, not unconscious bias or racial awareness,”

The Supreme Court could not be more clear about the special importance of the First Amendment in the university setting. Cohn quotes these famous words from Sweezy v. New Hampshire:

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.

Yet even when a state agency can regulate the expression of ideas, should it? After all, most cancel culture incidents don’t implicate the First Amendment either. Employers can fire you for your speech. Social media can block any of us from access to their platforms. But in law as in culture, the question of “can” is separate from the question of “should.”

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spent three days in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- two of them marathon sessions of questioning -- where she described herself as an impartial and transparent jurist, while taking a calm but forceful tone to push back at GOP claims about her record. The dueling themes that Democrats and Republicans wanted to present about her nomination were punched up in a final day of testimony from outside witnesses Thursday.

While she may pick up a few Republican votes, several GOP senators have sought to paint her as a soft on crime, "activist" judge, as they've used her hearings to showcase their messaging themes against Democrats heading into November's midterms.

"I am here, standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity," Jackson said Tuesday. She highlighted how her grandparents received little formal education and that her parents went to segregated lower schools in Miami, before studying at Howard University.

Warsaw, Poland (CNN)President Joe Biden declared forcefully Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin should no longer remain in power, an unabashed challenge that came at the very end of a swing through Europe meant to reinforce Western unity.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Biden, saying, "This is not to be decided by Mr. Biden. It should only be a choice of the people of the Russian Federation."In his speech, which drew a sharp line between liberal democracies and the type of autocracy Putin oversees, Biden warned of a long fight ahead."In this battle we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days, or months, either," he said.

Biden, standing along NATO's eastern edge, in Poland, issued a stern warning during his speech, telling Putin: "Don't even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory." He said the US was committed to the collective protection obligations laid out in NATO's charter "with the full force of our collective power."

Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the English department. She was one of several academics who described, in Heller’s phrase, an “orientation toward the present” among contemporary college students so powerful that they “lost their bearings in the past.”

“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” she told him, “I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.”

I flatter myself that I can mostly follow the sentence structure in these books, but in every other way I am the reader described by Claybaugh, too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past.