Group items tagged

One core feature of Trumpism is that it forces you to betray every other commitment you might have: to the truth, moral character, the Sermon on the Mount, conservative principles, the Constitution. In defeat, some people are finally not willing to sacrifice all else on Trump’s altar.

The split we are seeing is not theological or philosophical. It’s a division between those who have become detached from reality and those who, however right wing, are still in the real world.

Hence, it’s not an argument. You can’t argue with people who have their own separate made-up set of facts. You can’t have an argument with people who are deranged by the euphoric rage of what Erich Fromm called group narcissism

Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer

Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.

The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.

Joe Biden began his presidency on Wednesday with the same animating philosophy that guided his campaign: The center can hold.

Mr. Biden, now the 46th president, acknowledged all that in his Inaugural Address, calling for comity. “Let’s begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another,” he said. “Show respect to one another. Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war, and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”

“Without unity, there is no peace,” Mr. Biden said, “only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.”

President Joe Biden will sign three executive orders Tuesday that take aim at his predecessor's hardline immigration policies and try to rectify the consequences of those policies, including by establishing a task force designed to reunite families separated at the US-Mexico border, according to senior administration officials.

Lawyers are unable to reach the parents of 611 children who had been split from their families by US border officials between 2017 and 2018, according to the latest court filing in an ongoing family separation case.

Hours into his presidency, Biden moved to swiftly undo many Trump administration policies in a series of executive actions.

WASHINGTON — President Biden plans to sign three executive orders on Tuesday aimed at further rolling back his predecessor’s assault on immigration and at reuniting migrant children who were separated from their families at the Mexican border, according to administration officials.

In one order, the president will direct the secretary of homeland security to lead a task force to try to unite several hundred families that remain separated under former President Donald J. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which sought to discourage migration across the country’s southern border.

With two other orders, Mr. Biden will authorize a review of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies that limited asylum, stopped funding to foreign countries, made it more difficult to get green cards or be naturalized, and slowed down legal immigration into the United States.

he civil war raging inside the GOP may look like a problem for the Republican Party, but it is much more. It is a flashing red light for the entire country, warning America that if it continues on this path, it will become a country without guardrails against extremist ideologies.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and there's no prohibition against believing crazy ideas.

It's no wonder the venerable former Republican Sen. John Danforth said the GOP has become a "grotesque caricature" of what it used to be.

On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.

On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.

One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.

Performing the Hajj pilgrimage is compulsory for every Muslim who is physically able and can afford the trip. It consists of five days of ritual worship, practical formalities underscored by layers of meaning and symbolism. The symbolic themes of traveling toward the Beloved and of journeying between life and death are made real in the various and specific proceedings. Many of the rituals of Hajj, taught to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad, are drawn from the life of the Prophet Abraham and his family (known to Muslims as the Prophet Ibrahim).

The Hajj pilgrimage contains symbols of Abraham’s actions, including throwing stones at the spots where the devil taunted Abraham, the sacrifice of a sheep, and worship around the Kaaba. Enduring the sometimes-difficult journey to Saudi Arabia, and then the journey between various points around Makkah during the five days of Hajj, is also reminiscent of Abraham’s wandering nature

This strong woman, a slave and a woman of color, practically a single mother, had the strength to survive. Her memory is kept alive every day because her running between the hills of Safa and Marwa is a crucial part of the Hajj rites. Pilgrims re-enact Haajar’s search for help by walking between the two hills seven times while absorbed in prayer. Enter the holy mosque at any time of the year and you will see thousands of pilgrims walking in Haajar’s footsteps, because the walk between Safa and Marwa is also an obligatory part of the other Muslim pilgrimage (known as Umrah, which can be performed at any time of the year).

Social policy and law professor Anita Hill said Tuesday that voters should press Democratic presidential candidates on how they will tackle the issue of gender violence, arguing that little attention has been placed on the topic during this election cycle.

"We have been listening to presidential debates and I have been trying to keep track, but I haven't heard one question about gender violence posed to the candidates. That needs to be addressed," Hill said, speaking at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington. "I think this is something that we need to be raising awareness about. If you go to a town hall and you're in a primary state, I hope you'll raise your hand and ask the candidates what they're going to do about gender violence."

Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate last fall after Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor, testified before a Senate panel that he had sexually assaulted her while he was drunk at a party during their high school years -- an allegation Kavanaugh has vehemently denied.

Attorney General William BarrWilliam Pelham BarrJustice Dept. to launch criminal investigation into its own Russia probe: report William Barr is on the right side of history Lawmakers come together to honor Cummings: 'One of the greats in our country's history' MORE’s recent speech on religious liberty delivered at Notre Dame University has stirred controversy in some circles

Those who find fault with Barr’s remarks demonstrate a profound deficit in their knowledge of America’s history and its core constitutional commitments.

RFRA was made necessary by a 1990 Supreme Court decision, which devalued the strength of the Free Exercise Clause in a case involving Native Americans and the sacramental use of peyote. But those of us who worked so hard to pass RFRA understood that the decision undermined every faith and broadly bolstered the power of government to interfere with the sincere exercise of religious belief.

“What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?” What if rival tribalisms are largely untethered from ideologies?

This is plausible. The angriest conservatives, or at least people brandishing this label, show no interest in what was, until recently, conservatism’s substance: limited government, balanced budgets, free trade, curbs in executive power, entitlement reform, collective security. Conservatives’ anger is eerily unrelated to the comprehensive apostasy from what was, three years ago, conservatism’s catechism.

Of course, this catechism had long been (in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s formulation) avowed but not constraining: The conservative party did not allow professed beliefs to influence its behavior. So, on the right, a politics of passions unrelated to policy flooded into the vacuum of convictions unrelated to behavior.

It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.

The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.

now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.

if any group remains singularly loyal to Mr. Trump, it is the small but impassioned number of white voters on the far right, often in rural communities like Golden Valley, who extol him as a cultural champion reclaiming the country from undeserving outsiders.

These voters don’t passively tolerate Mr. Trump’s “build a wall” message or his ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries — they’re what motivates them. They see themselves in his fear-based identity politics, bolstered by conspiratorial rhetoric about caravans of immigrants and Democratic “coups.”

The festival itself was relatively small, drawing about 100 people, though significant enough to attract the likes of Mr. Gosar.

sticking with the truth is the best strategy for gaining power. Unfortunately, this is just a comforting myth

In fact, truth and power have a far more complicated relationship, because in human society, power means two very different things.

On the one hand, power means having the ability to manipulate objective realities: to hunt animals, to construct bridges, to cure diseases, to build atom bombs. This kind of power is closely tied to truth.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that he would send an envoy to meet with administration officials and discuss ways to address the issue together

the state was mobilizing 100 camping trailers to shelter some of the state’s more than 150,000 homeless people

Nearly half of all unsheltered people in the United States live in California.

George Orwell, after all, meant for his work to serve as a warning, not as a template.

How many injuries to American democracy can my Republican Party tolerate, excuse and champion?

It is elementary to have to say so, but for democracy to work one side must be prepared to accept defeat. If the only acceptable outcome is for your side to win, and a loser simply refuses to lose, then America is imperiled.

The insurrection is the latest and, in some ways, the most alarming lesson in how online extremism can translate into offline violence, but it should be the least surprising. It was building in online spaces even before the election, and has been escalating ever since.

The conversations were public, easily observable, and egged on by the president, who often engaged with them directly, and whose political career has been defined by whipping up paranoia and rage on the internet.

These celebrations were happening even on mainstream platforms.

Tens of millions of Americans were glued to their televisions, laptops and mobile devices Wednesday as an act of domestic terrorism played out live for the whole world to watch. Fear, anger and disgust were the reactions I heard most from friends, family and on social media platforms.

Many Americans are skeptical of the ability of politicians in Washington, particularly the Republicans, to hold all of the terrorists and their supporters accountable.

Time and time again for the last four years the American public has watched President Donald Trump avoid accountability for his outrageous and immoral behavior. Republicans have consistently enabled him, and our judicial system, with the exception of the election issues, has not been able to thwart his constant judicial stalling and obstruction. Color the American public skeptical that this time our institutions will deliver.

Calls for new protests in Washington, DC, and states across the country have law enforcement bracing for more possible violence in the coming days after rioters stormed the US Capitol last week leaving five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer.

A Department of Homeland Security official told CNN that the breach of the Capitol will sharpen the response and planning for inauguration.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has asked for additional security measures with ten days to go before Inauguration Day as Wednesday's riot has set off a shockwave of concern among federal, state and local officials for more possible bloodshed over the outcome of the 2020 election that ousted President Donald Trump from office.

Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”

They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.

If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.