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The problem is never guns. The problem is abortions. (“When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, then you do wind up with school shooters.”)

The problem is not guns; it is teaching evolution. It is the theories of Charles Darwin! “Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple of generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed.”

But the problem is never the gun. Hearts stop all the time, for myriad reasons. They are vulnerable to poverty and despair and anxiety, and the United States has all of those in ample supply.

Obviously the problem is the human heart. The human heart cannot stand the strain of living in the United States (a nice place, were it not for the nagging suspicion that any time you gather in a public place you might be gruesomely murdered with a gun). The human heart was not built for this low whine of anxious terror.

The problem is not guns. It’s not weapons. We have to protect ourselves. (From what, Mike? From what?) We must have our guns, to protect ourselves. (Then what are we arming the police like this for? Why are they laden with all this military-grade equipment, if protecting myself is not something I’m supposed to be outsourcing to them?)

The problem is the human heart. It breaks a little bit each time we see another mass shooting. If only they were a harder target. That is the problem. That so many hearts are aching for something to change, for a framework of laws that does not accept gun violence as inevitable.

Are there any reasons not to spend a bit more on children? The usual suspects will, of course, go on about the evils of big government, the sacred nature of individual choice, the wonders of free markets, and so on. But the market for child care, like the market for health care, works very badly in practice.

when someone starts talking about choice, bear in mind that we’re talking about children, who are not in a position to choose whether they’re born into affluent households with plenty of resources or less wealthy families desperately trying to juggle work and child care.

There is, instead, a practiced authenticity. The biggest stars — even Kylie Jenner — get ahead by giving you deep access to their real lives. As a result, much of what you see on Snapchat feels less like a performance than on other networks. People aren’t fishing for likes and follows and reshares. For better or worse, they’re trying to be real.

The diminution of personalization algorithms and virality also plays into how Snapchat treats news. Snapchat’s primary format is called a Story, a slide show of a user’s video clips that are played in chronological order. This, too, is an innovation; before Snapchat, much online content, from blogs to tweets, was consumed in reverse chronological order, from the most recent to the oldest. Snapchat’s Stories, which have since been widely copied, ushered in a more natural order — start at the beginning and go from there.

insiders at Snapchat noticed that Stories were an ideal vehicle for relaying news. They could be crowdsourced: If a lot of people were at a concert or sporting event or somewhere that breaking news was occurring, a lot of them were likely to be snapping what was happening. If Snapchat offered them a way to submit their clips, it could spot the best ones and add them to a narrative compilation of the event.

Snapchat began hiring producers and reporters to assemble clips into in-depth pieces.

Every day, Snapchat offers one or several stories about big and small events happening in the world, including football games, awards shows and serious news.

Snapchat has said that it thinks of itself as a camera company rather than a social network. This sounds like marketing puffery (after all, it only just started making its first actual camera, Spectacles), but I think its determination to set itself apart from the rest of the tech industry is important to note. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

In the late Clinton administration we had an arrangement with North Korea in which they had shuttered their nuclear weapons program in exchange for regular shipments of fuel oil, assistance with nuclear energy technology which could not be used for nuclear weapons and various other inducements. This arguably also involved a continuous cat and mouse game with the North Koreans, periodic shakedowns for more assistance, various care and feeding, etc. The incoming Bush administration viewed this deal as appeasement and an example of American weakness and set about a cycle of confrontation that eventually cratered the deal. North Korean quickly proceeded to become a nuclear state. What was termed the 'Agreed Framework' was unlovely and unsatisfactory in a number of ways; the alternative we got was considerably worse.

The key was that the Bush administration saw the Agreed Framework as appeasement but they were not - though they sometimes suggested they would be - willing to adopt the likely alternative of military confrontation. (We could soon see a similar set of events unfolded with Iran.) Thus the Bush White House was able to stand strong against appeasement (with all the psychological self-affirmation and self-satisfaction that entails) at the cost of allowing North Korea to become a nuclear state, which it has now been for more than a decade.

It is not as though any of this emerges against a backdrop of harmonious US relations with China. In addition to the long-simmering friction over trade, the US and China are currently engaged in a complex and increasingly perilous struggle over which country will be the dominant power in the maritime waterways of East Asia, through which a huge amount of the world's trade flows.

The key predicate to wise action is understanding the range of potential outcomes and costs of different choices and whether you are ready and able to sustain them. One of the things I noticed early with the hawks in the Bush administration was a frequent willingness to commit leaders to future costs they may not fully understand secure in the knowledge that once the actions are taken the leader will have to pay those costs whether they like it or not.

Some people think Trump has no actual foreign policy. This is not true. He is extremely ignorant. But he has an instinctive and longstanding way of thinking about and approaching foreign policy questions which goes back decades before he ran for President

It is one that sees international relations in zero-sum terms (for me to win, you have to lose), sees the US as being taken advantage of by allies (either through advantageous trade deals or expenditures on defense). This is why you see economic nationalism going back decades with Trump and either skepticism or hostility toward international treaty organizations like NATO.

What you also have in Trump is someone who is impulsive and aggressive by nature - you see these qualities in primary colors in everything he does. These are highly dangerous qualities in a President.

They become magnified when such a person is being advised by people who provide an ideological purpose and justification to such impulsiveness and aggression.

That is where I fear and believe we are with Trump. Not everything in foreign policy is sacred. But here we have an impulsive and ignorant man whose comfort zone is aggression surrounded by advisors with dangerous ideas

Even President Bush had a coterie of more Realist-minded and cautious advisors to balance out the hotheads. They lost most of the key debates - especially in the first term. But they provided a restraining counter-balance in numerous debates. At present there is no one like that around Trump at all.

He describes 9/11 as “a turning point for me.” He was by then hosting a show in New York, and remembers walking from Ground Zero to his studio and reading on air a 19th-century hymn written by a Mormon pioneer fleeing Missouri on his way to Utah. Beck says he felt a special calling at that moment. “If you have a position on the gate and you don’t warn the people of what you see,” he remembers thinking, “you’re to blame.”

In Doctrine and Covenants, a book of Mormon scripture, God says, “I have established the Constitution of this land by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” According to polling by David Campbell, a Notre Dame political scientist, 94 percent of American Mormons believe that the “Constitution and the Bill of Rights are divinely inspired.”

Mormons don’t just consider the Constitution sacred. They believe that its violation has allowed their persecution.

Today, many Mormons see defending the Constitution the way many Jews see opposing genocide: as a way of honoring their ancestors and affirming their identity.

Mormons tend not to accentuate these views publicly. Mormon culture, he told me, emphasizes a “moderate way of speaking.” Think Mitt Romney

The same doomsday sensibility that helps him appreciate the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds. Beck, in fact, pioneered some of Trump’s most disturbing themes

during the first 14 months of the Obama administration, according to Dana Milbank’s book Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America, Beck and guests on his Fox News show invoked “fascism,” “Nazis,” “Hitler,” “the Holocaust” and “Joseph Goebbels” 487 times. For good measure, Beck in 2007 said that Hillary Clinton sounds like “the stereotypical bitch.”

Beck says he’s sorry for all that. “I played a role, unfortunately,” he told Megyn Kelly during a 2014 interview on Fox News, “in helping tear the country apart.” He told me that now that America has “hit the iceberg,” he wants to help it heal

Although still generally conservative, Beck now insists that America’s real moral divide isn’t between left and right. He recently angered some conservatives by sending aid to undocumented children detained at the Mexican border. In a New York Times op-ed this fall, he called on conservatives to show “empathy” for Black Lives Matter activists. He says Americans must stop thinking in terms of ideological sides

When Barack Obama rose to the presidency after insisting, “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Glenn Beck called him a racist. Now that Donald Trump is president, Beck wants to bind the country’s racial and ideological wounds. He really does.

But for years and years, he called sheep wolves. Now that the wolf is here, it may be too late

The more pressing concern many of us had about Mr. Trump is that he simply isn’t up to the job of being president.

Last weekend Mr. Trump gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he said his administration would quickly put out its own health proposal, which would cover everyone now insured and cost much less.

The extraordinary and unenviable task facing the White House staff is to contain Mr. Trump, to keep a dysfunctional president from producing a dysfunctional presidency.

Beyond that, Mr. Trump has continued to demonstrate impulsivity and narcissism, an affinity for conflict and vindictiveness. Which leads to my main worry about Mr. Trump: His chronic lack of restraint will not be confined to Twitter. His Twitter obsessions are a manifestation of a deeper disorder.

He thrives on creating disorder, in violating rules, in provoking outrage. He is a shock jock. This might be a tolerable (if culturally coarsening) trait in a reality television star; it is a dangerous one in a commander in chief.

To understand why, it’s worth keeping in mind that my chief worries about Mr. Trump were never strictly ideological; they had to do with temperament and character.

When President Trump is buffeted by events — when hard times hit, when crises arise, when other politicians and world leaders do not bend to his will — pernicious things will happen.

Rather than try to address the alienation and anger that exists in America, he will amplify them. He’ll create yet more conspiracy theories.

He will also go in search of enemies — the press, the opposition party, other nations, even Republican leaders — in order to create diversions that inflame his most loyal supporters.

In failing to distinguish between the good of the nation and his own vanity, the danger is that Mr. Trump will fail to see the limits of his authority and will try to use both the bully pulpit and the power of government — the I.R.S., the F.B.I., regulatory agencies and others — to settle personal scores. He’ll do what he needs to in order to get his way.

What this means is that Republican leaders in Congress need to be ready to call Mr. Trump on his abuses and excesses, now that he is actually in office.

They need to ask themselves a simple, searching question: “If Barack Obama did this very thing, what would I be saying and doing now?” — and then say and do it.

man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.

what he said is nonsense. Israel is guilty of many sins, but “abhorrent processes that took place in Europe,” as he put it, are not happening here. The general was repudiated by politicians, mocked on social media and called upon by pundits to resign. Probably taken aback by such an angry reaction, General Golan backtracked the next day, albeit unconvincingly.

For the last several months there seems to be a widening gap between the public and the I.D.F. on matters of civil behavior.

the public is becoming increasingly divided when it comes to the leaders of Israel’s most revered institution: The left (a smaller group) defends them, while the right (the growing majority) resents their lecturing

As politicians turn the I.D.F. into a political football, the “center” — that is, most of us — watches in horror. We need our army to win all of the good battles.

Many Americans, then, are holding two contradictory ideas in their mind at once: the optimistic belief that their success is in their hands (on display since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) and the acknowledgement that wages have been steadily stagnating (on decline since the band America).

In his story, Gabler concedes that, no matter how illogical and uninformed his financial decisions might have been, he remained seduced by a superseding assumption that he “would always overcome any adversity, should it arrive.”

“This is the genius and the Achilles’ heel of American culture,” Newman says. “We do have a strong belief in self-determination and agency, even when our expectations fly in the face of reality.”

Struggling white-collar workers and managers, she says, especially stood out in her research for how likely they were to believe they were the authors of their own fate. “And if your destiny isn’t working out very well,” she says, “you only have yourself to blame,” in their telling.

part of what makes financial fragility so distressing in the United States is that citizens aren’t afforded the regimen of protections offered by Europe’s wealthier governments.

“These are social democracies that come to the rescue of people in trouble or are just more generous even if they’re not in trouble,” says Newman. “So the kind of suffering that will happen in a society like that is not one of material deprivation nearly as much as what we call in the trade ‘social exclusion.’”

Milo’s appeal on the right is, one might say, intersectional.

Moreover, his provocations tend to actually work, in the sense that they summon up the illiberal, “shut up or we’ll shut you down” side of left-wing politics.

for a cultural conservatism united only by a shared outsider sensibility, neither consistency nor propriety are consensus virtues any longer — and indecency in the service of attacking liberalism is no vice.

Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest.

he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.

His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.

that’s not all the president is doing.

Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.

“Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.

If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.

Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public

Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.To which the president replies:Many people have come out and said I’m right.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity.

“We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.

I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.

It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina.

One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.

At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.

I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.

The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.

The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us.

And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived.

Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.

Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.

The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.

In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists

They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right.

Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining.

It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.

And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.

There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.

This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.

We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.

Two considerations should inform our efforts, however modest our numbers. Both considerations should look to the post-Trump era, which cannot come soon enough and might possibly be upon us sooner than expected.

it’s our nation’s 45th president, who has indeed “set up a business for himself.” Mencken had Trump pegged even before Trump himself existed.

2016 presidential campaign progressives had expended even half the energy they have demonstrated since last November 8, a Jewish socialist from Vermont would today occupy the White House and Donald Trump would have resumed his duties as host of Celebrity Apprentice.

Trump himself represents the antithesis of all that conservatives putatively cherish

For the gaudy Trump, nothing is sacred or fixed or permanent. Everything is for sale. Let’s make a deal.

Trump’s success in hijacking the GOP has exposed the emptiness of that party’s claim to uphold conservative principles or any principles whatsoever

“such a professor of the central democratic science may throw off his employers and set up a business for himself. When that day comes there will be plenty of excuse for black type on the front pages of the newspapers.” That day has now seemingly arrived

minimize damage to the Constitution, whether inflicted by Trump himself or by his opponents.

I myself will not shed a tear should Trump be involuntarily and permanently returned to the eponymous tower from which he descended to complete the corruption of American politics.

Let it be done, however, in strict compliance with either Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution or alternatively in accordance with Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.  

Anyway, given sufficient rope, Trump—perhaps with the unwitting assistance of bullying associates like Steve Bannon—will likely hang himself.  

will find principled conservatives in direct opposition to those on the left who through ignorance or ill will cite Trump as reason enough to declare conservatism itself invalid and impermissible.

President Trump is already doing untold damage to core conservative convictions.

Pursuing a de facto policy of permanent war, they have squandered American lives and treasure on a prodigious scale while accomplishing next to nothing. Need proof? Assess U.S. achievements over the past decade-and-a-half in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Put simply, Trump is enabling a smear, which will make it all the harder for advocates of policies based on prudence and pragmatism when he sooner or later departs from office.

It’s incumbent upon conservatives to push back against that smear.

Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it. Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship.

As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”

In 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

Like the college-admissions officer of his nightmares, he just finds race too useful as shorthand to refrain from giving "special treatment" based on skin color. But only when the "special treatment" unfairly disadvantages blacks -- never when it advantages them.

I nevertheless find it perverse that he insists on the scrupulous treatment of young black males as individuals anytime they would benefit from group preferences, and then, when they'd most benefit from being treated as individuals rather than dark-skinned objects of suspicion, he prejudges all young black males based on statistics about the racial group to which they belong.

For Hanson, it is a miscarriage of justice worth lamenting if an Asian-American applicant to UC Berkeley loses a spot to a black applicant due to racial preferences

What is the likely result of that injustice? The Asian-American applicant must attend UCLA or UCI.

What are the consequences of racial-profiling, the form of individuality-effacement Hanson defends? Countless innocent black men -- that is to say, the vast majority who will never rob or assault anyone -- walking around under constant, unjust suspicion from fellow citizens and law enforcement; heightened racial tension across America; prejudice passed down across generations; and some innocent blacks killed while under wrongful suspicion.

Exodus is a reminder that statecraft is soulcraft, that good laws can nurture better people.

the general vision is that the laws serve many practical and spiritual purposes.

The laws tame the ego and create habits of deference by reminding you of your subordination to something permanent. The laws spiritualize matter, so that something very normal, like having a meal, has a sacred component to it. The laws build community by anchoring belief in common practices. The laws moderate religious zeal; faith is not expressed in fiery acts but in everyday habits. The laws moderate the pleasures; they create guardrails that are meant to restrain people from going off to emotional or sensual extremes

The 20th-century philosopher Eliyahu Dessler wrote, “the ultimate aim of all our service is to graduate from freedom to compulsion.”

Exodus provides a vision of movement that is different from mere escape and liberation. The Israelites are simultaneously moving away and being bound upward.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

if today we know the scale of Mao’s crimes, it is not as a result of decades of academic work on the subject. The first detailed examination of the famine, Hungry Ghosts (1996), was written by the Hong Kong-based journalist Jasper Becker. It was only in 2010 that the historian Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine appeared, a pioneering study based on years of research in recently opened Chinese archives

Apart from accounts given in the memoirs of those who survived, the human costs of the Cultural Revolution were best captured by Simon Leys (the pen-name of the Belgian sinologist and literary critic Pierre Ryckmans) in his books Chinese Shadows (1974) and The Burning Forest (1987). The authoritative and revelatory Mao: the Unknown Story (2005) is the work of Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday. Aside from Dikötter’s, none of the books that captured the human experience of life under Mao was written by a professional academic.

the prestige of the Mao regime in the west was at its height when the leadership was believed to be at its most despotic and murderous. For some of its western admirers, the regime’s violence had a compelling charm in its own right.

During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving “ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical texts”.

Condemned as distorting Mao’s ideas and exerting a “widespread and pernicious influence”, the book was withdrawn from circulation in February 1979 and a hundred million copies pulped.

But it wasn’t just the powerful who felt the sting of cartoonist’s pens. In 19th-century Europe and America, minority groups who felt maligned, like Jews or Irish-Americans, also lodged frequent complaints against what they saw as stereotypes, only to be largely ignored.

Continuing censorship battles in the 20th century gave rise to underground comics, with their nothing-is-sacred sensibility. And Charlie Hebdo, which arose in the wake of the 1960s battles over France’s then-restrictive speech laws, did outré political satire better than just about anyone, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said.

When it reprinted the Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad in 2006, “they were the only magazine to do it for absolutely the right reasons,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “The others that published the cartoons were baiting Muslims, but for them it was part of their self-perceived mission to be provocative, to provoke thought.”

But not everyone in the comics world has taken such an admiring view. Mr. Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter said that when he posted some of what he called Charlie Hebdo’s “ugly, racist” covers in a show of solidarity on Wednesday, he got a number of emails from cartoonists challenging the decision.

“Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech,” Mr. Spurgeon said.

“In the face of a really horrible attack on free speech, it’s important that we don’t blindly disseminate super-racist material,” he said in an interview, referring to some colleagues’ decisions to repost some of Charlie Hebdo’s particularly extreme cartoons.

Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt’s puzzling contention that he “never realized what he was doing”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?

In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”

She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services — and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies — were aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.

no future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man’s biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.

But the only thing this reflexive complaining does is divide the country further and make a coherent response to Islamic State more difficult.

There, I met Dale “Red” Robinson, a Pearl Harbor survivor and a staff sergeant in the infantry who was later part of the Normandy landing. He recalled the national unity of that war

“Nothing like this, these days. It’s sad, kind of sad, my friend.”

Robinson said he feels “sorry for all of the soldiers” serving today, let down by their political leaders.

That’s what Monday afternoon’s ceremony was about. A sailor rang a bell at 1:57 p.m. Eastern time, the moment 74 years earlier when Japanese planes struck

ater, while the band played “America the Beautiful,” the veterans, some wheeled, some walking with support, made a slow procession around the memorial’s pool to place wreaths

We live all of us today with the prosperity and the security built on the shoulders of these heroes,”

That’s our challenge — and we’re failing.

“The difference is the uncertainty of today, and it’s a big difference,”

“I thought they were more loyal, more concerned about the nation than their position,” he said.

Mays complained about the sharp partisan divisions in Congress. “How can we bring unity when you have that?”

Now, our representatives can’t even manage to come up with a resolution authorizing the use of military force against the Islamic State — and they’ve been at it for a year.

“just a half-hearted attempt to defend and distract from a failing policy.” Ryan said we are “one step behind our enemy.”

and the constant sniping at each other does nothing to defeat the Islamic State. As those old soldiers on the Mall taught us, victory comes from unity.