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n recent years, the mainstream environmental movement has moved strongly in the direction of social justice — the very opposite of what hate groups seek.

Now, the leaders of those organizations fear white nationalists are using green messages to lure young people to embrace racist and nativist agendas.

Environmental activists want to create a sense of urgency about climate change, the loss of biodiversity and other insults to the natural world, but they don’t want their messages to drive people into deranged ideologies.

There is a danger of “apocalypticism,”

The document believed to have been posted by the alleged El Paso shooter cites birthrates among the “invaders” trying to enter the United States and asserts, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

It’s important, he said, to provide people with potential solutions and reasons to be hopeful: “There’s definitely a danger of people taking dire measures when they feel there’s no way out of it.”

these accused killers did not come up with their hateful ideologies in a vacuum. They have tapped into ideas about nature that are in broad circulation among white nationalists. Before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, for example, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer published a manifesto that had a plank on protecting nature.

Ecofascism has deep roots. There is a strong element of it in the Nazi emphasis on “blood and soil,” and the fatherland, and the need for a living space purified of alien and undesirable elements

Some early conservationists embraced the eugenics movement that saw “social Darwinism” as a way of improving the human race by limiting the birthrates of people considered inferior. “There’s this idea coming out of the eugenics movement that nature, purity, conservation were linked to purity of the race,”

Some of those on the environmental left have seen the explosion in the human population — which is nearing 8 billion and has more than doubled in the past half-century — as a primary driver of the environmental crisis. That argument has then been adopted by racists.

environmentalists “need to steer away from this apocalyptic discourse because it too easily plays into the hands of apocalyptic white nationalism.”

if anti-immigrant groups are genuinely concerned about degradation of the natural world, they’re targeting the wrong people. Climate change hasn’t been driven by poor people struggling to get by. The activities of wealthy nations have been the main historical source of greenhouse gas emissions, the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of habitats.

‘Who are the people we need to limit? Who are the people making decisions about that?’ . . . Until we have true equity and equality and a balance of power, then we know vulnerable communities are going to end up on the negative side of the ledger, whatever the tough choices are,”

Many camp clinics are already struggling to fight outbreaks like dengue and cholera, leaving them without the resources to treat chronic conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease. The coronavirus, which has no vaccine or agreed upon treatment regimen for Covid-19, the respiratory disease it causes, could be even more devastating, medical experts warn.

So far, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases among refugees is low, but that may be the result of a lack of testing. Testing is severely limited, and refugees are rarely a priority.

Refugee camps across Africa, the Middle East and Asia are packed with traumatized and undernourished people with limited access to health care and basic sanitation, perfect breeding grounds for contagion. Extended families jam into tarpaulin shelters with mud floors. Food, water and soap are often lacking. Illnesses, from hacking coughs to deadly diseases, go untreated, facilitating their spread.

Daily life in a refugee camp is an ideal incubator for infectious disease. Many lack running water and indoor sanitation. People often stand in line for hours to get water, which is insufficient for frequent showers, much less vigilant hand washing.

Nor are there adequate health systems. The same conflicts that have displaced huge numbers of people have decimated medical facilities, or forced people to live in places where there are none.The war in Syria has sent more than a million refugees into Lebanon, which is facing an economic crisis. Many live in cramped, squalid conditions and suffer from acute poverty.

Many refugees also suffer from poor nutrition and other health conditions that could leave them particularly vulnerable. In Bangladesh, where about 860,000 Rohingya Muslims fled to escape persecution in Myanmar, the authorities fear that the coming rainy season will cause sewage to overflow into flimsy shelters and possibly spread the coronavirus.

A lack of information in the camps has elevated the sense of panic among people already primed for anxiety. In Bangladesh, the government has limited mobile internet access for many Rohingya, creating an information vacuum that has allowed rumors to flourish:

Aid agencies that have contended with donor fatigue at a time when the number of displaced people is at a record high are worried that health and economic crises in the West will mean less money for refugees. Some fear that people in wealthier nations will worry less about people in poor ones when they feel threatened at home.

Not only that, but the introduction of “just in time” manufacturing in recent years means that many companies don’t store the components necessary to keep their factories running. They are dependent on the parts arriving “just in time” from their suppliers, often from thousands of miles away.

There is also spare capacity that is now free to be used

The logistics industry seems confident that it can keep the shops supplied. Christopher Smelling, the Freight Transport Association's head of policy, says that the continuing empty shelves is a result of panic buying, and not a lack of supply.

For instance, the closure of car plants across the country means that their fleets of supply trucks will not be needed for the duration

The UK is also vulnerable because it does not operate in a vacuum, it imports almost half of its food, and therefore the smooth working of other countries supply chains is vital to our own.

At the moment this system still seems to be working. Goods are still arriving from Italy for instance, even though the country is in a shutdown

If coronavirus has shown us anything, it is how complicated and delicate supply chains have become

After this crisis has passed, there is bound to be immense pressure on companies and governments to strengthen and simplify them.

The next task was undertaking the vast production and allocation of masks, other protective gear and ventilators. Instead of centralizing this task, President Trump said from the White House lectern, “Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.” He added, “You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

The vacuum left by the federal government forced states to compete for scarce equipment like ventilators, driving up their price and benefiting shady middlemen while causing fatal delays.

Unwilling to take the blame for shutting down the economy when he thought there was little public support for the move, he sparred with governors like Mr. Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan while also hiding behind them.

“The governors, locally, are going to be in command,” he said on the same day Mr. Pence spoke of federalism’s virtues. “We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job.”

he shifted to using the governors for partisan gain. Last Friday, Mr. Trump said they “should be appreciative, because you know what? When they’re not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps. They’re not appreciative to FEMA.” He then said he told Mr. Pence not to call those who were unappreciative.

he made his point: Governors who criticized the president would put their states at risk of getting short shrift from the federal government.

Colorado, Maine and Massachusetts, led by two Democrats and a Republican critic of the president’s pandemic policies, received only small fractions of what they asked for while Florida got the delivery it requested — twice over.

Last week, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers wrote to the National Governors Association asking for uniform directives with a single definition of “essential” businesses that can operate.

Mayors can assist, as the U.S. Conference of Mayors did last week by surveying its members and telling the public that almost 90 percent of cities did not have enough test kits or masks and other protective equipment for health care workers.

the governors, with their direct responsibility for the welfare of their citizens, have urgent reason to band together and do better.

The exodus is so large that it is reshaping the very concept of childhood in Venezuela, sending grade-schoolers into the streets to work — and leaving many exposed to the swirl of abusive players who have filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Venezuelan state, including sex traffickers and armed groups.

In rare situations, children have been passed from grandparent to cousin to neighbor, with each caretaker migrating or disappearing, until young people finally have found themselves alone.

The arrival of the new coronavirus in Venezuela has isolated these children further. To combat the spread, President Nicolás Maduro has announced a countrywide lockdown, sending the military into the streets to enforce the measures.The effort has cut many young people off from the teachers and neighbors who may be their only means of support. At the same time, borders are now closed, severing these children from the rest of the world and making it impossible for their parents to return, or to come and retrieve them.

armchair epidemiology, which Slate described as “convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses.”

The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.

Conservative pundits, who’d spent weeks downplaying the seriousness of the virus, were drawn to Mr. Ginn’s conclusion that “shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.”

The Fox News political analyst Brit Hume tweeted the post, and then so did the anchors Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham. Within hours, the blog post was amplified across conservative media.

“I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.”

Epidemiologists disagreed, pointing to some of Mr. Ginn’s assumptions as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”

After a 31-tweet thread from the infectious-disease expert Carl Bergstrom debunking Mr. Ginn’s data as cherry-picked, Medium took the post down, prompting a backlash in conservative spheres. More than two million people had already viewed it.

Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.

This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,

“When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”

At first glance, the piece looked quite convincing. Mr. Ginn drew heavily from charts from the C.D.C., Johns Hopkins and the Financial Times. “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say,” he claimed.

Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.

“Statistical analysis is a black box to most of us,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “And it’s like, ‘I can’t challenge a multilinear statistical regression because I don’t know what that is,’

“And so a form of authority gets imposed on a reader and we tend not to challenge data the way we’ve learned to challenge words.”

Mr. Evans is concerned that ultimately important nuance will be lost and pro-Trump pundits will use the news to exclusively scapegoat China and divert blame away from domestic failings. “What’s scary is how smart the false stuff is,” he said.

Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”

The Trump administration and right-wing media watchdogs will weaponize changing facts about the virus, pointing to them as proof of a deep state bent on damaging the president or a media apparatus trying to swing an election

Others will try to pin the blame for the pandemic solely on the Trump administration

What we don’t know about Covid-19 will degenerate into ever more intricate conspiracies — some almost believable, some outrageous but all dangerous.

“We’re in a stream of ever-evolving data, and it’s being shaped around cognitive biases, partisanship and preferences embedded in our cultural identities,”

I called Mr. Pomerantsev because the information vacuum around the virus made me think of the title of his earlier book on Russia — “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.

In the absence of new, vetted information, reckless speculation takes its place, muddling our conception of the truth.

in crisis situations — especially early on — our desire for information exceeds our ability to accurately deliver it. Add to this the complexities of epidemiology: exponential growth; statistical modeling; and the slow, methodical nature of responsible science.

Together, they create the ideal conditions for distrust, bad-faith interpretations and political manipulation, the contours of which we’re only beginning to see.

“The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”

The United States has tested about 4 million people over several months. A new Harvard report says we need to be testing more like 5 million every day. But because our federal government is failing so miserably in that effort, the rest of us are left to do what we can to at least try not to get this thing in the first place. That means staying away from other people. And it means hoping our states, cities and municipalities will step up and fill the leadership vacuum left by the White House. Because this is less a problem of people than leadership: Overwhelming majorities of Americans under lockdown orders are complying with them. Overwhelming majorities of Americans support the restrictions. But we know that many people will, understandably, trust what our leaders tell us -- and too many of our conservative leaders are not earning that trust.

Especially in times of crisis, civilians need intelligent, thoughtful leadership. We need leaders who understand they are not experts on everything under the sun, and that leading with a narrow and reactionary ideology is no way to govern. We need leaders who will take pains to understand the scientific consensus, make difficult choices when necessary and lead with the truth. Unfortunately, the US doesn't have that at a federal level -- and several red states don't have it at a state level, either. And we're all paying the price for this long-time GOP malfeasance.

America’s midlife crisis has been realized in the flesh in the decaying Woodland mall: these men and women have been overwhelmed by an inherently unsatisfiable longing for freedom. To them, paying taxes, to be compelled to pay taxes, is a form of enslavement. By this definition, who among us is free? Who among us could ever be free?

Is freedom just what you could have been, rather than what you turned out to be? Is freedom just a word for youth that has passed? At the Woodland mall they know that, whatever freedom is, they are losing it. “How far are you willing to be pushed?” Finicum Finch asks. “When is your faith going to be bigger than your fear?” No political programme could ever assuage the hunger for impossible freedom it has sprung from.

Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, came to the same conclusion: “the most potent and forcible cause” of the Roman empire’s collapse was “the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves”

Cultures commit suicide. That’s how they end. Just like with men and women, it’s not the challenges of life that break you, it’s your own internal contradiction

America’s internal contradictions are beginning to overwhelm its politics. The preppers combine all the features that have defined American existence since its beginning: the apocalyptic visions, the maniacal over-reading of the constitution, the desire to live by self-reliance but in total conformity, self-righteous violence and the evasion of taxes.

How many great American tech companies boil down to tax-and-regulation-evasion schemes? Hollywood is the world’s number one gun fetishist. Donald Trump isn’t from north-west Ohio, he’s a New Yorker – more a Billy Joel New Yorker than a Lou Reed New Yorker, sure, but a New Yorker nonetheless. The traits on display at the Woodland mall are evident everywhere. They are present in every aspect of its history. Why do you think every major columnist at the New York Times thought bombing Baghdad to rubble would solve the crisis of the Middle East? They’re bred to it. In America, the answer is violence. What was the question again?

Middle age is when the bullshit you tell yourself begins to crumble of its own accord. Middle age is when the sum total of your decisions, rather than the dreams you began with, starts to become who you are. You were once the hero of your own story but the best you can manage now is to be the punchline to your own joke. The urge to have it all burn down and start over is ferocious.

Middle age, for people and for countries, is a reckoning much more uncomfortable than a collapse: you find out who you are.

that $2 trillion plan doesn't exist in a vacuum. It comes less than a month after Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package aimed at helping the country bounce back from the economic devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biden's embrace of a robust federal government spending trillions is also evidence of just how far the country has moved the the days of austerity championed by Clinton.

He had watched as Republicans two years earlier had seized control of the House majority for the first time in four decades by running on the "Contract with America," -- a campaign document rife with promises of balancing the federal budget and delivering tax cuts to Americans. And Clinton wanted to make sue the country knew he wasn't the free-spending, big government liberal that he knew Republicans would seek to cast him as in the 1996 campaign.

That is literally a line that any leading Republican in the 2010 edition of the GOP could have uttered.

Clinton knew that people were sick of the federal government and wanted it out of their lives. Things were going well in the country -- the economy had begun to hum after the struggles of the early 1990s with unemployment dropping, low interest rates and low inflation.

Now, hop back into the time machine and set the date for yesterday: March 31, 2021

The economy has been devastated, with the unemployment rate surging to almost 15% in the teeth of the Covid-19 shutdowns. And while the economy appears to be recovering as the number of vaccinated Americans rises, the data still suggests that the effects of the pandemic continue to linger. One example: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.2 million people who have dropped out of the labor force were prevented from looking for a new job due to the pandemic in February.

Moments of crisis tend to remind people why the federal government exists -- and how it can do some things (like coordinate a nationwide vaccination program) that no other entity in public life can.

In January 1996, almost 6 in 10 Americans said the government was "trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses," in Gallup polling. Just 1 in 3 (35%) said the government should be doing more. In August 2020, just 4 in 10 Americans (41%) said the government was trying to do too much while 54% wanted it to do more. It marked the first time since October 2001 where the percentage of people wanting the government to do more had eclipsed the percentage who wan ted it to do less. (That October 2001 number came in direct response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.)

He is offering up trillions in spending to ease the transition back into "normal" life for the country. The question he -- and we -- face is this: Was Mae West right? Is too much of a good thing wonderful?

Second, the science shows that the older a tree gets, the more carbon it can absorb and store. It's like slowly turning up the speed on a vacuum cleaner. That means that we need to not only protect the old forests but also allow the young forests to grow old. It also means that protecting forests that are already established is one of the most effective strategies when it comes to climate change.

Third, we all support the re-establishment of forests on lands where there are none currently, but that is a long-term strategy and we need short-term solutions that address the current climate emergency. We only have about eight years to turn things around, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is much more effective to protect a natural forest that already exists than to plant a new one. It takes decades, if not up to a century for a forest ecosystem to evolve and time is not on our side when it comes to avoiding climate chaos.

Death now comes daily to Europe’s beaches. How is this tolerable?

President Bashar al-Assad and cronies stand accused of a wide range of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Civilians, rescuers, health workers and hospitals are routinely (and illegally) targeted. The International Criminal Court is stymied by Russian and Chinese vetoes

Repeated regime use of banned chemical weapons in defiance of global treaties has grave international ramifications.

Russia has repeatedly hindered investigations, while the US has ignored its own “red lines”. As a result, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is seriously weakened.

A lasting beneficiary of the war is Islamic State (Isis), which overran territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014. While an international coalition eventually crushed the caliphate, Isis was behind many terrorist attacks in Europe in 2014-17.

The war has marked a clear shift in the Middle East balance of power from the US to Russia. After Barack Obama declined to intervene militarily, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, filled the ensuing power vacuum in 2015 – and probably saved Assad’s regime. Joe Biden’s main concern is deterring pro-Iranian militia and jihadists – witness last month’s limited air strikes. The UN-led peace process collapsed in January – and Biden seems to think it’s too late to save Syria. It would be great to be proved wrong.

Western states initially expressed sympathy for attempts to overthrow dictators and authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria in 2010-12. But as events turned unpredictable and Islamists got involved, the west backed away. The window that briefly opened on peaceful reform in the Arab world slammed shut. The cause of global democracy was a big loser. Syria symbolises its defeat.

Israel worries about the build-up of Iranian Revolutionary Guard and pro-Tehran armed forces in Syria and Lebanon. It has launched hundreds of air strikes on Iran-linked targets there, and has urged the US to do likewise

The failure to end the war has done enormous damage to international institutions. The UN security council in particular has been severely discredited. So, too, have UN peacemaking efforts. Yet if the UNSC’s “big five” had really wanted to stop the conflict, there is little doubt that, acting together, they could have done so. That they did not even try is the Syrian war’s most shameful legacy.

there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on

hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.

Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.

All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”

“The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”

This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists

Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.

it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.

spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.

competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives

“The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.

What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not

Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.

Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public

Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc

As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.

The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”

In his work, he contrasted the two most dominant modes of social culture found in human societies:

1. Tribal

Pre-literate cultures are tribal.

Tribal people inhabit a sensual, dynamic and non-linear world. Reality is taken in through all the five senses, words are seen as a kind of magic, and the emphasis is on communicating knowledge through oral storytelling.

the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing——rather than enlarging——the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences.

2. Literate

Modern cultures are literate.

They evolved from the development of the printing press and mass literacy, which imposes linear thought and reliance on sight at the expense of other more interactive senses. Literate cultures place an emphasis on communicating knowledge through written language and abstract ideas.

Literate cultures are outward-looking, individualist, and generally less hostile to other cultures.

While the individualism and literacy of what he called “Western man” lead to the rise of the modern world based around logic and order, he argued the age of electronic media would have a re-tribalizing effect on Western culture that would alter sensory patterns and return literate people to a tribal, emotionally volatile state.

Tribal cultures are inward-looking, collectivist and often hostile to other cultures.

Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence——violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial….”

Incredibly, McLuhan was saying this decades before the invention of the World Wide Web and the mobile revolution that massively accelerated this process.

What we’re seeing today is a re-tribalization of literate Western people but much of it is happening beyond the traditional boundaries of human culture: race, ethnicity, family, religion, and gender.

In fact, many of the more radical communities forming among the dispossessed and underemployed are openly hostile to traditional human cultures and Western values like freedom of speech and association. People’s frustrated identity quest can lead them to the violence of nihilism and self-destruction.

To make matters worse, we are increasingly stuck in Internet filter bubbles and safe spaces without exposure to different ideas and perspectives. We are seeing the rise of many new interest and identity groups that are re-tribalizing and losing compassion and tolerance for those who think, believe and act differently.

This kind of weakness, failure to speak out publicly and lack of legislative action on substantive policy matters created a political vacuum for extreme voices like Reps. Gaetz and Greene, who have gained a foothold in the GOP with their politics of grievance, conspiracy theories, nativism, nihilism and dishonesty

Owning the libs, whining about the transgendered in women's sports, promoting the discredited stolen election lie, and above all else, pledging fidelity to Trump have emboldened the extremists and given voice to their crackpottery.

the US Senate must move quickly to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is no time for delays or political gamesmanship -- not when American lives, and the American way of life, are on the line.

As deputy secretary of the agency, he helped lead a successful effort to guard against terror attacks, enhance our nation's cybersecurity and strengthen cooperation between the federal national security apparatus and state and local agencies

Under former President Barack Obama, Mayorkas served as both the DHS deputy secretary and the head of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the department. And prior to his time in DHS, he was a US attorney in the Central District of California.

Congress can send a clear message to all those who seek to intimidate or inflict violence upon our nation: that they can no longer exploit our political divisions to assault the principles that unite us

it is crucial that we have a highly qualified, capable Homeland Security secretary in place on Day 1 to safeguard our nation and protect us against all manner of threats.

It's no mystery why nominees to lead our national security agencies are historically given confirmation votes no later than Inauguration Day -- as Obama's and President Donald Trump's Homeland Security nominees were confirmed on January 20 of 2009 and 2017, respectively.

America's enemies, both foreign and domestic, thrive on and are emboldened by any inkling of chaos, dysfunction or vacuums of vigilant leadership in our security capabilities. Having a qualified, competent secretary of Homeland Security at the helm right away is critical even at times when threats are relatively quiet. Having one at the helm under today's conditions may well be an existential necessity.

Given the blaring threat of further violence following last week's attack -- to say nothing of ongoing foreign terrorism threats, a pending crisis at our border and the massive cyberattack recently perpetrated by Russia against our government and private sector -- there is simply no excuse to delay a vote on the confirmation of Mayorkas.

Whatever the Republican Party does, it faces an ugly fight. The fracture that so many politicians on the right have been trying desperately to avoid may soon happen. But if the party has any hope of playing a constructive, rather than destructive, part in America’s future, it must do two things.

America in its early days was not a full democracy by any stretch of the imagination. The institution of chattel slavery remained a bedrock of our society, and much of our economy. The violent, forced seizure of Native American land was a cornerstone of the American ideal of “manifest destiny,” codified into policy through laws like the Indian Removal Act.

our republic did not arrive overnight.

There is nothing magical about our democracy that will rise up and save us. Building the democratic processes we cherish today took hard and dedicated work, and protecting them will take the hard and dedicated work of people who love this country.

And it would take a civil-rights movement, a century after the Civil War, to end legal segregation and establish basic protections for Black people in this country.

Even then, it would take decades of organizing to guarantee women the right to vote—and later basic reproductive freedom

It would take a labor movement to outlaw child labor, institute the 40-hour work week, establish a minimum wage, and create the weekend.

t took a literal civil war to quash a violent white-supremacist insurrection, and then to extend basic rights to the formerly enslaved.

The genius of our Constitution is not that it was ever sufficient (the Bill of Rights was not even included at first), but that it was modifiable—subject to constant improvement and evolution as our society progressed.

Our republic is like a living, breathing organism. It requires attention and growth to meet the needs of its population. And just as it can be strengthened, it can be corrupted, weakened, and destroyed.

Donald Trump was not elected in a vacuum. Inequality, endless wars, and the corruption of unaccountable elites are all common precursors to either violent revolutions or dramatic expansions of democracy.

President Joe Biden has been tasked with bringing us back from the brink. He will govern a country whose citizens no longer share the same basic reality. He will govern a country that has deep, unhealed wounds and layers of unresolved traumas. We must all work with him and with one another to heal those wounds and to resolve those traumas. The insurrection on January 6 tells us that we are almost out of time.

Will we follow Trump and his co-conspirators down the path of democratic breakdown, or choose instead the arduous route of democratic reform?

Those who plot, plan, or incite violence against the government of the United States must be held fully accountable. That includes not just conviction of the former president by the United States Senate, but removal of any lawmaker or law-enforcement officer who collaborated with the attackers.

We are doomed to repeat this cycle of instability and backsliding if we do not make a bold effort to reimagine our democracy—from our elections on down. We need to end the dominance of unchecked corporate money in our politics, remove the substantial barriers to voting for low-income communities and people of color, ban gerrymanders, and give full voting rights and self-government to the voters of Washington, D.C.

We must remove the antidemocratic elements from our system, including by eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, reforming the courts, abolishing the Electoral College, and moving toward a ranked-choice voting system.

political violence does not go away on its own. Violent clashes and threats to our democracy are bound to repeat if we do not address the structural inequities underlying them. The next Trump will be more competent, and more clever. The work to prevent the next catastrophes, which we should all be able to see coming, starts now.

The real reason goes deeper. It lies in a risk-averse European culture marked, in several countries, by skepticism about vaccines. As a safeguard against public backlash, Europe’s leaders sought to secure as many guarantees as possible. Tellingly, one of the most difficult points in the negotiations with vaccine manufacturers was the degree of liability the bloc wanted them to accept if anything went wrong.

For one, it might allow Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who’s eager to erase his own failures in handling the pandemic, to claim that great advantages come from being outside the bloc — an argument that nationalists throughout Europe would be eager to hear

This pandemic is the first global crisis since World War II in which American leadership has been absent. Europe, united and purposeful, could have filled the vacuum — but so far the opportunity has been badly missed. It must learn from the experience.

The U.S. mission shift to protecting oil fields could also raise issues in Congress.

Turkey’s agreement with Russia to jointly send in troops to the region to fill the vacuum created by the U.S. withdrawal has also caused heartburn at NATO.