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“The Koreans continue to do well because of the details,” said Fan Xiaojing, a Chinese journalist and long-term analyst of the Korean entertainment industry. “China just can’t capture the romance.”

The Chinese are catching on, producers on both sides say, as they also learn what content resonates most with Chinese audiences. According to producers, the show must be fast-paced, and if it is a drama, it should be a love story.

Where other people saw freedom — from the desktop, from social convention, from the boring guy in front of them — Mr. Powers saw “a kind of imprisonment.” “There is a great deal of conformity under way, actually,

Increasingly intensive Russian airstrikes are pushing thousands of Syrians north, away from the northern outskirts of the once bustling city, according to the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, the main opposition group.

A sense of panic among those fleeingRead More

<img alt="Aleppo, once a bustling city, has been reduced to rubble in Syria's civil war." class="media__image" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/151020182337-syria-aleppo-zaidoun-al-zoabi-large-169.jpg">Aleppo, once a bustling city, has been reduced to rubble in Syria's civil war.But the latest video appears to show a sense of panic among the thousands streaming out of the northern outskirts of the city, fleeing for their lives -- bound, most probably, for the Turkish border, 60 miles (97 kilometers) to the north.

"Now 10,000 new refugees are waiting in front of the door of Kilis because of air bombardments and attacks against Aleppo,"

"Sixty to seventy thousand people in the camps in north Aleppo are moving toward Turkey. My mind is not now in London, but in our border -- how to relocate these new people coming from Syria? Three hundred thousand Aleppo people, living in Aleppo, are ready to move toward Turkey."

Innocent civilians 'running for their lives'

"We are cut off from Aleppo City," said David Evans, Mercy Corps' regional program director for the Middle East. "It feels like a siege of Aleppo is about to begin."

"Right now, we are seeing tens of thousands of people make their way to the border with Turkey."

"Innocent civilians are running for their lives," Evans said.

“Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.

Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him

Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide

The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.

In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”

In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”

Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.

In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers

The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.

In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.

Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that

Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”

President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.

Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.

On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.

A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants

When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.

Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”

t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”

Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,

“It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”

Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.

Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.

He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe

it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.

two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.

Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.

the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.

The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it

historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name

Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.

The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.

The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.

One week ago, the governor restricted in-person shopping at outdoor supply stores, the use of motorboats for recreation, and most recreational travel inside the state. The state had absorbed some of the highest infection numbers and the highest job-loss numbers; all of a sudden, it had the toughest regulations on how residents could behave.

In multiple segments this week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested Whitmer's “authoritarian” orders were designed to help her in the veepstakes. During an online “Women for Trump” event, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, who previously ran the party in Michigan, claimed that Whitmer had “turned this crisis into a platform to run for vice president.” At Wednesday's protest, conservatives who spoke took as given that Whitmer was angling for a bigger job and that it would backfire.

Whitmer's approval rating actually had surged since the start of the pandemic, with two-thirds of Michiganders approving of how she was doing her job, though no poll had been released since she ordered the new restrictions. North Carolina's Roy Cooper and Ohio's Mike DeWine, a Democrat and a Republican, had also seen big boosts to their personal popularity, right before facing protests outside their offices this week

“We’re to the point where the state is restricting every move we make,” said Ashley Smith, a co-founder of ReOpenNC and a participant in this week's protest in Raleigh

“We need to consider how we’ve behaved in every other viral outbreak. These decisions have been based on models, not actual data.”

“I feel that most of America feels the way that we do right now,” said Garrett Soldano, the founder of the Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine Facebook group, on a Wednesday live stream for its 350,000 members. “Keeping healthy people at home is tyranny.” (According to polling, the vast majority of Americans remain nervous about reopening businesses if there is a threat of spreading infection.)

“They want to keep us away from churches and synagogues. They want to make sure we don't go back to work,” Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro said on Wednesday. “What happened in Lansing today, God bless them: It's going to happen all over the country.

“It's really similar to the DNA of the tea party movement,” Brandon said. “No one I know is saying this is a sham, that the virus is fake. But I do hear small-business owners say, hey, I was forced to shut down, but my business doesn't even require me to get close to customers. And the whole idea that you can have ‘essential’ and ‘nonessential’ businesses is funny to me. Every business is essential, or else it wouldn’t exist.”

And while states have begun putting together plans to reopen businesses, some Republican elected officials have also started freelancing, asking whether places with few or no reports of the coronavirus could return to normal.

“It may be that when people go back to work that they wear a mask and gloves for some period of time, to limit the spread of disease,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said yesterday.

The protests have been less measured. On his Wednesday live stream, Soldano talked to one quarantine skeptic who warned that the restrictions on Michigan's housing supply and gardening stores were in sync with Agenda21, a U.N. plan for sustainable development that for years has been seen on the right as a plot to restrict freedom

Soldano suggested that if restrictions lifted, protesters could enter “phase two” of their plan, holding rallies and campaigning to “strip not only the Michigan governor, but other governors, of the right to do this again.” There was even a push to recall Whitmer, which would require more than 1 million valid signatures collected over 60 days.

the multitude of Trump campaign flags, signs and merchandise led to Whitmer criticizing the rally, as a distraction from the issue it was designed to highlight: when to reopen Michigan.

“It wasn’t really about the stay-at-home order at all,” Whitmer said on MSNBC on Wednesday night. “It was essentially a political rally, a political statement that flies in the face of all of the science." 

The days are “kind of like speed dating from hell,” as one analyst put it, and the evenings are “the world’s most tedious cocktail party.”

But when Mr. Trump attends the first United Nations session of his presidency this coming week, all eyes will be on him as counterparts from around the globe crane their necks and slide through the crowd to snatch a handshake — and, in the process, try to figure out this most unusual of American leaders.

“For a number of leaders, this is going to be their first chance to see him, to judge him, to try to get on his good side.”

In some places, there has been an instinct to dismiss Mr. Trump as a bombastic, Twitter-obsessed political and diplomatic neophyte. “But the fact is you can’t write off the American president,” Mr. Alterman said.

One of Mr. Trump’s primary tasks will be to define how his America First approach — which has led him to pull out of international agreements on free trade and climate change — fits into the world-first mission of the United Nations.

Mr. Trump arrives in New York at a time of crackling tension over North Korea’s provocative actions and deep uncertainty about what he will do with President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

Mr. Trump is settling into a somewhat more conventional foreign policy than many had anticipated, analysts said.

The president has not launched an all-out trade war with China, ripped up the Iran deal or the North American Free Trade Agreement, or moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, at least not yet.

On Friday, he addressed discontent about his approach with a Twitter post that started, “Republicans, sorry,” as if he were not one of them

“This week was the first time he struck out and did something completely at odds with what the Republican leadership and establishment would want him to do in this position.”

The DACA program will now expire in six months, plunging these immigrants into limbo, and so far, Congress has done nothing but talk about helping them. Democrats see some hope in Mr. Trump’s seeming lack of commitment to his own draconian edict — last week, “Nancy” persuaded him to tweet reassurance to those affected. It’s a slim reed, but they hope he will pressure Republicans to act on the Dream Act, a 16-year-old proposal to resolve these immigrants’ legal status permanently.

Mr. Trump and his new Democratic friends could work on more. They could raise spending caps set to kick in next month by matching increases in military spending that Republicans want with increases in domestic spending that Democrats favor. They could back a proposal to automatically increase the debt ceiling, ending perennial partisan battles over what used to be a routine vote essentially recognizing the debts Congress has already incurred

Other companies, including Comcast NBCUniversal and Disney, opted last year to release films directly to online streaming as theaters were closed.Movie theater revenues were battered by the pandemic. A number of big movies have been delayed from 2020 or early 2021 openings, including Dune, Jurassic World: Dominion and the next James Bond installment, No Time to Die.

The mayor of Maui says homes and bridges have been severely damaged in the community's ongoing flooding emergency. "This has been unprecedented flooding, and we will be making damage assessments today," Mayor Michael Victorino said in a written statement Tuesday.

The entire state is under a flash flood watch until 6 a.m. local time Wednesday.

The floodwaters were so furious they knocked his daughter's bedroom off the foundation, Alexander told the outlet, as he with family members and friends began shoveling feet of mud out of their home.

On Monday, Victorino said that residents told him it was the worst flooding they've seen in over 25 years.

"Catastrophic flooding from Opaeula Stream. Evacuate now from Haleiwa town," the Honolulu County government said in an emergency notice Tuesday afternoon. "You are in danger. Leave now."

"My caution to anyone watching is please heed that warning and evacuate. We don't do those kind of orders capriciously, we do those with purpose, they are most serious," Mayor of the City and County of Honolulu Rick Blangiardi said in a video address on Tuesday.

"When you see flood damage in the light of day, it's a reminder of the sheer power of fast-moving water," said Victorino, who visited flooded areas. "We are so fortunate there were no reported deaths or injuries. I want to publicly thank our first responders who did heroic work under very dangerous conditions."

"Yes, it's like a bridge, small one over a stream," she said of the road. "It hasn't stopped raining one second. We are about 15 minutes away from the dam."

In the Northeast, where case counts are on the rise, adults will be able to register for appointments starting April 1 in Connecticut and April 2 in New Hampshire. On the opposite coast, California announced Thursday that adults ages 50 and older will be eligible for appointments starting April 1, with individuals 16 and older to follow on April 15.Other states are moving to make more groups eligible ahead of schedule, based on age or underlying conditions.

More states will join that list in the coming days. Starting March 29, for example, eligibility will expand to all adults in places like North Dakota, Louisiana, Ohio and Texas. Minnesota and Indiana will similarly expand access before the end of the month.

Alaska became the first state to make vaccinations available to all adults over the age of 16 earlier this month, followed by Mississippi. Several others have since followed suit, including Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Georgia and West Virginia.

New Jersey's governor said on Friday that people ages 55 and older, individuals over the age of 16 with intellectual and developmental disabilities, higher education employees and other essential workers will qualify starting April 5. Floridians ages 40 and older will be eligible beginning March 29, officials announced Thursday.

According to a map released by the White House COVID-19 Response Team on Friday, four states have yet to confirm plans to expand eligibility ahead of the May 1 deadline: New York, Wyoming, Arkansas and South Carolina, where officials have said they are not on track to hit that threshold until May 3.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the briefing that the country has seen an uptick in case counts and hospital admissions, with the most recent 7-day averages showing about 57,000 cases and 4,700 hospitalizations per day, and hospitalizations hovering around 1,000.

Noting the trajectory with concern, she implored listeners to "take this moment very seriously" and continue following public health guidance.

Friday's announcement comes a day after Biden declared a new goal of getting 200 million shots in arms by his 100th day in office, or the end of April. Federal officials said the country hit his initial target of 100 million doses last Friday, which was his 58th day in office.

The U.S. is administering 2.5 million shots a day at its current pace, Zients said, adding that vaccine makers are "setting and hitting targets." Some 27 million doses went to states, tribes and territories this week.

Johnson & Johnson has accelerated production of its single-shot vaccine and is on track to deliver 11 million doses next week. Zients expressed confidence that it will, and, in doing so, meet its goal of 20 million doses for the month of March.

Amazon says that customers' privacy and security are "foundational" to how it has built Amazon Sidewalk. The network has three layers of encryption and has protections to keep customers from viewing data from others' Sidewalk-enabled devices. Amazon also put together a white paper outlining Sidewalk's privacy and security measures.

Instead of trying to sell device owners on the merits of joining the program, Amazon adds devices to the shared network unless owners go through the steps to opt out.

The company says it's all in the customer's interest.An Amazon spokesperson says the company "believe[s] Sidewalk will provide value for every customer and we want to make it is easy for them to take advantage of benefits such as more reliable connections, extended working range for their devices, easier troubleshooting and no additional connectivity costs to customers."

And customers can decide to opt out at any time, the spokesperson says. If you opt out, your connection won't be pooled, and you can't draw from the pool, either.

Mr. Biden asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico in a video call this month whether more could be done to help solve the problem, according to Mexican officials and another person briefed on the conversation.

Mexican officials acknowledge that relations between the United States and Mexico, which has suffered one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus epidemics, would be buoyed by a shipment of doses south.

Several European countries suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine this week, a precaution because some people who had received the shot later developed blood clots and severe bleeding.

Until Thursday, all of Canada’s vaccine supply had come from Europe or India, and Canada’s roll out has proceeded at a slow pace compared with the United States and many other countries.

A Biden administration official declined to comment further on the negotiations with Mexico, but noted that both countries shared a common goal of reducing migration by addressing its root causes, and said they were working closely to stem the flow of people streaming to the border.

But on Thursday, Europe’s drug regulator declared the vaccine safe. AstraZeneca has also said that a review of 17 million people who received the vaccine found they were less likely than others to develop dangerous clots.

The Biden administration’s appeal to do more against migration has put Mexico in a difficult position. While Mr. Trump strong-armed Mexico into militarizing the border, some Mexican officials argue that his harsh policies may have at times helped lessen their load by deterring migrants from attempting to make the journey north.

Many Canadians have expressed dismay that the United States had not shared any supplies with Canada, where no coronavirus vaccines are manufactured.

Mexico has agreed to increase its presence on its southern border with Guatemala to deter migration from Central America, one of the government officials said,

Beijing is shipping vaccines to dozens of countries, including some in Africa and Latin America. Russia has supplied its vaccine to Hungary and Slovakia.

Local government officials in Ciudad Juárez and shelter operators say Mexico is dialing up operations to capture and deport migrants along the northern border.

Despite the very public tensions with Mexico under Mr. Trump, Mr. López Obrador has been wary of the Biden administration, concerned that it might be more willing to interfere on domestic issues like labor rights or the environment.

The need for vaccines in Mexico is clear. About 200,000 people have died in the country from the virus — the third highest death toll in the world — and it has been relatively slow to vaccinate its population.

“Mexico needs cooperation from the U.S. in getting its economy jump-started and getting vaccines to get out of the health crisis,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

“There’s a statement made by a witness, or an interaction with a lawmaker, and users are able to put together a counternarrative in real time.”

Cameron described the live comment streams as laboratories of right-wing talking points, most likely to attract viewers who already share a certain bias. These viewers are unlikely to change their minds, and thus shift opinion polling on impeachment, which has remained relatively stable.

Social media once held out promise to connect the world. But in a polarized climate, the firmest bonds appear to be forming among those who already share the same views, allowing partisans to choose not simply their own coverage but the community with which they process it. Self-selected information nourishes identity, experts said, reducing politics to entertainment and blood sport.

the Democratic approach rests on more traditional means of persuasion. What committee leaders described as a solemn process, compelled by the president’s own admissions and propelled by “ample facts,” Trump and his congressional allies decried as a charade.

But the talking points are then exported through other channels, he added, and eventually reach persuadable voters. Social media, he said, does not just echo but serves as an “amplifier, with powerful cross-pollination on the different platforms, until the talk eventually reaches the office water cooler or coffee machine, or the Thanksgiving table.”

“The more social media allows for those kinds of communities that make you feel like you’re part of a group that you aren’t physically in, it can give you the illusion that your opinions are more widely held than they really are,”

“That’s a powerful feeling, to be part of a community watching and interpreting something in the same way.”

Discussions about the hearing also appeared on YouTube, where live streams similarly became flooded with conspiracy theories and racist vitriol

The sort of news consumption enabled by the tech giants remains a largely unstudied phenomenon

The phenomenon bears some relationship to talk radio, she said, which allows listeners to call in and share their observations — and to feel as though they’re part of the coverage.

That sense of participation became pronounced over the last few weeks, as the watch parties turned into cheering sections for Republican lawmakers who delivered especially impassioned rebuttals for the president

By the 2010s, the once-bipartisan organization had become almost completely Republican in its orientation, hardening political divides. Republicans coveted its money — the N.R.A. donated $20 million to six Republican Senate candidates in the 2016 election cycle — but also its ability to rally grass-roots support with endorsements and independent expenditure advertising campaigns.

Over the years, the N.R.A. had become more nonprofit in theory than in practice. Revenue passed $350 million last year, with some prodigious donors continuing into the afterlife

In 2017, eight N.R.A. executives outearned the head of the American Red Cross, another tax-exempt organization, and one with 10 times the revenue, according to a previous analysis by The New York Times

LaPierre’s compensation rose from less than $200,000 a year in the mid-1990s to more than $2.2 million in 2018. Oversight has been complicated by paydays to the 76-member board:

Ackerman lawyers, in court filings, called NRATV “LaPierre’s brainchild,” and said he “routinely urged” the company to “give him ‘more gasoline,’ ” seeking more “notoriety for the N.R.A.

Richard Feldman, a former N.R.A. lobbyist, once explained the challenges to me more bluntly: “The worse it is for the people you represent,” he said, “the better it is for you.”

When Donald Trump emerged as a presidential front-runner in 2016, the N.R.A. spent $30 million to help him get elected, much of it on attack ads warning that Hillary Clinton would “leave you defenseless.”

Brewer decided to take the case. Whatever he felt about the N.R.A., he said, he saw a principle at stake. Government investigators should not target political enemies. “People were not only crossing the lines that are appropriately drawn by our Constitution,” he said, “they were aggressively determined to blur, cross, obliterate those lines. And you know what? If they could do it to those guys, they could do it to me. They could do it to all of us.”

In the early days of the relationship, McQueen worked to soften the N.R.A.’s rough edges. “We’re advertising people, we’re optimists,” McQueen, who died at 74 in July after a struggle with lung cancer, once said in a speech. “Our work fills the spaces that distract the eye from tragedy.”

In recent years, however, that work became increasingly dark, promoting the N.R.A. as the last defense against a threatening world. The apocalyptic promotional effort reached its apotheosis with NRATV, an online streaming service that evolved beyond gun rights into a sort of paranoid-lifestyle channel.

While the N.R.A. had faced many legal troubles over the years, the February 2018 attack, in which a former student murdered 14 students and three staff members with a legally purchased AR-15-style rifle, had renewed widespread revulsion toward efforts to block gun-control measures. Corporations fled. United and Delta airlines, along with the car-rental giant Enterprise Holdings, stopped offering discounts to N.R.A. members, and the First National Bank of Omaha stopped offering an N.R.A.-branded Visa card.

LaPierre, for his part, told me that the relationship “started to go wrong when they” — McQueen — “started NRATV.” While he was initially supportive, he said he and other N.R.A. officials found some content disturbing. In a court filing, the N.R.A. complained that it had spent millions of dollars on a network “viewed as a dystopian cultural rant that deterred membership growth.

Ackerman now says in court filings that “several millions of dollars annually” in expenses for N.R.A. officials were run through the company, adding that LaPierre “made false representations” about expenses used “for his own personal benefit.

When the N.R.A.’s 2017 tax filings were released last year, they showed a nearly-tapped-out $25 million line of credit, backed in part by the deed to its Fairfax headquarters, and that the N.R.A. borrowed against insurance policies taken out on executives. Gun-control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords were ascendant, amid outrage about mass shootings, and they outspent the N.R.A. in midterm elections.

Both the Texas Trial Lawyers Association and the Texas Association of Defense Counsel were among those who filed a joint amicus brief against Brewer. “It’s very unusual that a defense bar and a plaintiffs’ bar agree on an issue so much that they file a consolidated brief,” said Brian Lauten, lead attorney on the amicus brief. “The conduct of Bill Brewer directly threatens that constitutional right to a fair and impartial jury.”

Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four

That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another

What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything.

These days, the tourists are gone, mostly. But — and here’s the point — the bars, restaurants, and clubs are still full. I pass by them on my daily walk to the park and wonder: what are these people doing? How are they sitting there so close to one another, with no social distancing in place, laughing, joking in the middle of a literal pandemic that’s exploding all around them? What the?

The people I pass by in the bars are made of two social groups, largely. Young people, and the working class. That’s the same group, in a sense, since most young people are working class, until they amass enough wealth to rise beyond it

They have made a choice. Their beer and burger or cocktail and steak matters more than stopping the spread of a deadly disease. What the?

This group is putting the most vulnerable in society at profound risk. Those who are already ill, and immunocompromised. Those even lower down the socioeconomic ladder than them — minorities, the underclass, and so forth, among whom death rates are astronomical. The elderly, the frail, the aged.

Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends. What the?

The groups who are now apparently completely indifferent to spreading Covid seem to have taken their cues from leaders. Young people and the working class seem to have no conscience or compunction left whatsoever about spreading Covid

To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children. Are they right?

There is a kind of toxic indifference that seems to have spread through Western societies. Life itself is treated with a kind of shrugging fatalism — especially those of the vulnerable. It is literally valued less than a night out at the pub by much of society.

The attitude of toxic indifference is what the West seems to share in common now, and that is why it has been brought to its knees by Covid.

the West” is not monolithic. Certainly, toxic indifference is not at the same level across all of it

let me discuss the most extreme examples — America and Britain — to highlight where toxic indifference comes from: leadership.

In Britain and America, Covid cases have now exploded well past their first peak. America is approaching 100,000 cases per day — the point at which social breakdown will begin. Britain is hitting more than that, on a per capita basis. And yet neither of these societies has a national lockdown.

uccessful societies — New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and many more — deliberately crunched the curve. Their strategy was to eradicate Covid, through what’s now a global template of best practices — lock down, test, trace, quarantine, isolate, and so forth.

The approach of Western leaders, in other words, was reactive, hesitant, and cautious, not decisive, swift, and proactive:

Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died

Western leaders, in other words, modelled toxic indifference for their societies. They gave people a license to be indifferent, by acting largely indifferent themselves.

Young people justify it by saying that “they need to have social lives” — as if they weren’t spending most of their social lives online before Covid, and the working class by saying they need to work. Both of those arguments are partially true. But it’s truer to say that these are groups which have become dangerously indifferent to preserving the value of the lives of the vulnerable.

The young and the working class are punching down, as American leftists would put it.

More formally, more accurately, Covid has made Western societies predatory ones. The young and working class are exploiting and abusing those more powerless than them

Neither group seems to consider the possibility much that society needs to come together to defeat the pandemic, once and for all, and the only way that can be done is to put the vulnerable first.

America treating Covid indifferently is no surprise, after all — it’s a nation where kids are gunned down in schools, diabetics are simply left to die, people beg strangers online for money to pay for crippling healthcare costs

But it’s more surprising to see Europe turning predatory due to Covid, or having Covid expose its vulnerability to becoming predatory

I don’t mean to single the young and working class out. That is missing my point. What I am saying is that toxic indifference is trickling down in the West. From elites, like leaders, to the bourgeois — that’s been the case for the last few decades

Indifference is trickling down from the elite and the bourgeois, to the working class and the young.

we know where a society of indifference ends. It ends in America. In stupidity, ignorance, violence, hate, racism, brutality, and the poverty and despair which underlies it all.

The indifferent cannot act collectively, therefore they cannot invest, transform, change, unite, come together, and therefore they cannot live in a modern, functioning society, with an expansive, sophisticated, supportive, generous social contract

So what about climate change? Mass extinction? Ecological collapse? The massive waves of depression and ruin those will unleash — in the next decade? How can societies that can’t unite, act wisely, behave responsibly to fight Covid come together to do much about even larger catastrophes?

Covid reveals the decivilizing of the West. As I mentioned, Margaret Mead said the fundamental test of civilization is the healed femur: that someone took the time and effort to heal someone else. It is the absence of indifference and the presence of care, in other words

What made the West special, once upon a time, was not its brutality, but its idea of civilization, as the elevation and nourishment of every life, with dignity, purpose, belonging, truth, justice, and, more crucially, the idea that freedom was a society that was able to act in a civilised way.

freedom became free-dumb: the idea that my right to be abusive, exploitative, ignorant, violent, selfish — to carry a gun to Starbucks or deny you healthcare and retirement — came to prevail

If the pattern of the West’s decaying attitudes, the spread of the foolish American idea of free-dumb as “freedom,” is what Covid has revealed — I punch down, on the person below me, I exploit and abuse the person even lower than me in the socioeconomic hierarchy, because that is what I must do to survive, or at least what I have been taught to do to feel good and worthy — then the simple fact is that the West has little future

Their failure teaches us something. Civilization matters. When a society gives up on the idea of being civilized, it collapses harder and faster than its most learned wise men often imagine. That is because no society can withstand a tidal wave of stupidity and violence. Is that where the West is headed?

In a simpler way, maybe the simplest, what I am talking about is a lack of simple human goodness. That is what Mead’s Femur points to — the presence of goodness — and it is what is missing in America and Britain. They are now societies with a massive, gaping, jaw-dropping lack of human goodness, and Covid is just the latest example. But that deficit spells real trouble — it isn’t some kind of abstract moral concern.

Covid is a cold wind, and it shows that the flame is flickering. If anything, it shows us the future of civilization — in Mead’s sense, as the absence of violence, and the presence of decency, dignity, care, nourishment, equality, of human goodness realized — may lie in the East.

Trump caught many capitals and White House officials by surprise on 20 May, when he tweeted: “Now that our Country is ‘Transitioning back to Greatness,’ I am considering rescheduling the G-7, on the same or similar date, in Washington, DC, at the legendary Camp David. The other members are also beginning their COMEBACK. It would be a great sign to all – normalization!”

Had Abe attended the summit, he would have been required either to quarantine himself for two weeks or take a Covid-19 test on his return. Officials told Japanese media they did not want Abe to be seen to be getting privileged treatment, and cited the backlash the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, has faced for clearing his senior adviser of breaking UK quarantine rules.

The UK is hosting a virtual coronavirus vaccine summit on 4 June intended to establish a global alliance and raise funds for research, and will hope the US decision to withdraw from the WHO does not dominate the event.

The Guardian has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. Like many other news organisations, we are facing an unprecedented collapse in advertising revenues. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting.