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She estimated the total loans were less than $500,000

"It's a matter of semantics in terms of listing that that was a loan and we're asking the FEC what we need to do to update it, if anything."

Cruz frequently shares with audiences the decision by his wife, Heidi

When asked by CNN's Dana Bash how he squared his image with the large loan from Goldman Sachs, Cruz played up the hard decision to pour their income into the Senate run.

"Heidi and I when we ran for Senate, we made decision to put our liquid net worth into the campaign."

Federal election records show Cruz extended loans of more than $1 million to his campaign during the 2012 cycle.

Campaign aides on Wednesday were publicly treating the fracas lightly, sharing other examples of #CruzCrimes

the economic security of most Americans dwindled, and the legitimacy of the system was called into question. One consequence has been the rise of the far right; another is Donald Trump.

Germany insisted that the struggling countries had to practice austerity in order to restore the confidence of private financial markets. In a deep recession, even orthodox economists at the International Monetary Fund soon recognized that austerity was a perverse recipe for economic recovery.

Europe, because of Germany’s worries that these policies would lead to inflation, had no way to extend credit to struggling nations or to raise money through the sale of bonds, which would have allowed the ECB to provide debt relief or to invest in public services.

The political result was the same on both sides of the Atlantic—declining prospects for ordinary people, animus toward elites, and the rise of ultra-nationalism

Not so in Europe. Parties such as the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the French Socialists disgraced themselves as co-sponsors of the neoliberal formula that brought down the economy.

In nation after nation, the main opposition to the party of Davos is neofascism.

In his masterful narrative, the economic historian Adam Tooze achieves several things that no other single author has quite accomplished. Tooze has managed to explain a hugely complex global crisis in its multiple dimensions, and his book combines cogent analysis with a fascinating history of the political and economic particulars

when the collapse came, it was “a financial crisis triggered by the humdrum market for American real estate.”

the collapse reinforced the financial supremacy of Washington and New York. “Far from withering away,” he writes, “the Fed’s response gave an entirely new dimension to the global dollar.”

When the entire structure of borrowed money collapsed, the losses more than wiped out all the capital of the banking system—not just in the US but in Europe, because of the intimate interconnection (and contagion) of American and European banks. Had the authorities just stood by, Tooze writes, the collapse would have been far more severe than the Great Depression:

While insisting to Congress that the emergency response was mainly to shore up US finance, Bernanke turned the Fed into the world’s central bank. “Through so-called liquidity swap lines, the Fed licensed a hand-picked group of core central banks to issue dollar credits on demand,” Tooze writes. In other words, the Fed simply created enough dollars, running well into the trillions, to prevent the global economy from collapsing for lack of credit.

Bernanke instigated government action on an unimagined scale to prop up a private system that supposedly did not need the state

Using deposit guarantees, loans to banks, outright capital transfers, and purchases of nearly worthless securities, the Fed and the Treasury recapitalized the banking system. To camouflage what was at work, officials invented unlimited credit pipelines with disarmingly technical names.

The blandly named policy of quantitative easing, which drove interest rates down to almost zero, was a euphemism for Fed purchases of immense quantities of private and government securities.

The crisis, Tooze writes, “was a devastating blow to the complacent belief in the great moderation, a shocking overturning of the prevailing laissez-faire ideology.” And yet the ideology prevailed

In a reversal of New Deal priorities, most of the relief went to the biggest banks, while smaller banks and homeowners were allowed to go under

Banks were permitted to invent complex provisional loan “modifications” with opaque terms that favored lenders, rather than using their government subsidies to provide refinancing to reduce homeowner debts

How did a nominally center-left administration, elected during a financial crisis caused by right-wing economic ideology and policy, end up in this situation?

Turning to Europe, Tooze explores the fatal combination of Germany’s demands for austerity with the structural weakness of the ECB and the vulnerability of the euro.

Portugal or Greece now enjoyed interest rates that were only slightly higher than Germany’s, and markets failed to take account of the risk of default, which was more serious than that of devaluation.

instead of treating the Greek situation as a crisis to be contained and helping a genuinely reformist new government find its footing, Brussels and Berlin treated Greece as an object lesson in profligacy and an opportunity to insist on punitive terms for financial aid

A central player in this tragedy was the European Central Bank. Tooze does a fine job of explaining the delicate dance between the bank’s leaders and its real masters in Germany. Since Germany opposed continent-wide recovery spending, the bank could only pursue monetary policy. The model was the Fed. Yet while the Fed has a congressional “dual mandate” to target both price stability and high employment, the ECB’s charter allowed for price stability only

The ECB, with the consent of the Germans, came up with one of those bland-sounding names, Outright Monetary Transactions, for its direct purchases of government bonds. But the program, at the insistence of the Germans, was restricted to nations in compliance with Merkel’s rigid fiscal terms, which limited national deficits and debts. In other words, the money could not go to the very nations where it was needed most, since the hardest-hit countries had to borrow heavily to get themselves out of the recession

Reading Tooze, you realize that it’s a miracle that the EU and the euro survived at all—but they did so at terrible human cost.

the ideal of liberalized trade, and the use of trade treaties to promote deregulation or privatized regulation of finance, is a major element of the story of how neoliberal hegemony promoted the eventual collapse. But except for a passing reference, trade and globalized deregulation get little mention here.

he has almost nothing to say about Janet Yellen. Her nomination as Fed chair in 2013 to succeed Bernanke was an epochal event and an improbable defeat for the proponents of austerity, deregulation, and bank bailouts who influenced Obama’s policymaking. Yellen, a left-liberal economist specializing in labor markets, was the only left-of-center Fed chair other then FDR’s chairman Marriner Eccles. She also believed in tough regulation of banks. The extension of quantitative easing well beyond its intended end was substantially due to Yellen’s concern about wages and employment, and not just price stability, since low interest rates can also help promote recovery.

Tooze ends the book with a short chapter called “The Shape of Things to Come,” mainly on the ascent of China, the one nation that avoided all the shibboleths of economic and political liberalism, though it also, of course, does not have a political democracy.

Tooze calls it a problem in “Western capitalism” intentionally. It was not just an American problem.

One of the great strengths of Tooze’s book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems.

In 2006, European banks generated a third of America’s riskiest privately issued mortgage-backed securities. By 2007, two-thirds of commercial paper issued was sponsored by a European financial entity.

“Between 2001 and 2006,” Tooze writes, “Greece, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the U.K., France, Ireland and Spain all experienced real estate booms more severe than those that energized the United States.”

while the crisis may have been caused in both America and Europe, it was solved largely by Washington. Partly, this reflected the post-Cold War financial system, in which the dollar had become the hyperdominant global currency and, as a result, the Federal Reserve had truly become the world’s central bank.

therein lies the unique feature of the crash of 2008. Unlike that of 1929, it was not followed by a Great Depression. It was not so much the crisis as the rescue and its economic, political and social consequences that mattered most

The Fed acted aggressively and also in highly ingenious ways, becoming a guarantor of last resort to the battered balance sheets of American but also European banks. About half the liquidity support the Fed provided during the crisis went to European banks

Before the rescue and even in its early stages, the global economy was falling into a bottomless abyss. In the first months after the panic on Wall Street, world trade and industrial production fell at least as fast as they did during the first months of the Great Depression. Global capital flows declined by a staggering 90 percent

But Tooze also convincingly shows that the European Central Bank mismanaged things from the start

China, with its own gigantic stimulus, created an oasis of growth in an otherwise stagnant global economy.

The rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined

The governing elite did not anticipate the crisis — as few elites have over hundreds of years of capitalism. But once it happened, many of them — particularly in America — acted quickly and intelligently, and as a result another Great Depression was averted. The system worked

The Federal Reserve, with some assistance from other central banks, arrested this decline. The Obama fiscal stimulus also helped to break the fall.

On the left, the entire episode discredited the market-friendly policies of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder, disheartening the center-left and emboldening those who want more government intervention in the economy

On the right, it became a rallying cry against bailouts and the Fed, buoying an imaginary free-market alternative to government intervention. Unlike in the 1930s, when the libertarian strategy was tried and only deepened the Depression, in the last 10 years it has been possible for the right to argue against the bailouts, secure in the knowledge that their proposed policies will never actually be implemented.

The crash brought together many forces that were around anyway — stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about immigration and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government — and supercharged them. The result has been a wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism in the West today.

confirmation of this can be found in the one major Western country that did not have a financial crisis and has little populism in its wake — Canada.

No government handled the crisis better than that of the United States, which acted in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion in late 2008 and almost seamlessly coordinated policy between the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. And yet, the backlash to the bailouts has produced the most consequential result in the United States.

experts are considering the new vulnerabilities of a global economy

we are confronting a quite different problem — an erratic, unpredictable United States led by a president who seems inclined to redo or even scrap the basic architecture of the system that America has painstakingly built since 1945. How will the world handle this unexpected development? What will be its outcome? This is the current crisis that we will live through and that historians will soon analyze.

Herbert said the extent of the damage is not yet clear. When clinic staff thawed a few eggs affected by the malfunction, they found that the tissue remained viable. Staff have not checked any of the embryos, he said.

For affected patients who are still eager to use their eggs or embryos to try to become pregnant, Herbert said the clinic plans to first thaw them and check for viability. If the tissue is not viable, he said, “we are going to make our patients happy one way or another.”

The emergencies mentioned in the guidance are fires, floods, power failures and terrorist attacks — but do not include instances in which a clinic’s own equipment fails.

Americans wanted a postwar system that outlawed such logic. In 1945, at the San Francisco Conference that founded the United Nations, the American delegate Harold Stassen explained that the United States “did not want exercised the right of self-defense before an armed attack had occurred.” Four years later, in August 1949, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, ending America’s nuclear monopoly. Some in the military entertained the notion of destroying the USSR’s embryonic arsenal. But NSC 68, which in April 1950 famously outlined America’s strategy for fighting the Cold War, declared the notion unthinkable. “It goes without saying that the idea of ‘preventive’ war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans,” it insisted.

The shift began after the Cold War. The generation of policymakers with first hand memories of World War II was passing from the scene. The 1991 Gulf War had boosted confidence in the American military. And the adversaries seeking nuclear weapons were no longer great powers like the Soviet Union and China but smaller “rogue states” like Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, with less capacity to retaliate against an American attack.

Now Donald Trump is perpetuating that assumption when it comes to North Korea. Referring to the potential for Pyongyang to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, he tweeted, “It won’t happen.” This week Mike Pence declared that, “When the president says all options are on the table, all options are on the table. We’re trying to make it very clear to people in this part of the world that we are going to achieve the end of a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula—one way or the other.”

To legitimize preventive war, Trump’s advisors are resuscitating all the bad arguments made about Iraq and Iran. Kim Jong Un’s ballistic missile tests, argues UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, prove that he is “not a rational person.” Really? Kim is a monster. But from the standpoint of regime preservation, his pursuit of nuclear weapons is highly rational. Since 9/11, the United States has deposed governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It just bombed regime targets in Syria. What do these regimes have in common? They couldn’t deter an American attack because they didn’t have nuclear weapons. The North Koreans refer over and over to Muammar Qaddafi, who abandoned his nuclear program in a bid to win the West’s affection, and ended up being sodomized by Libyan rebels who were using NATO as their air force.

It’s hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed “to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.” For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war.

That humility has been lost. If asked whether China, Russia, or even France, has the right to launch wars against countries merely because those countries are building weapons that could one day pose a threat, Americans would quickly say no. They would recognize immediately that such a right, if universalized, threatens the peace of the world. Yet in both parties, policymakers grant that right to America. They do so even after Iraq. And even with Donald Trump in the White House.

It is now Americans who consider themselves a higher breed, capable of wielding powers that they would consider illegitimate and terrifying in anyone else’s hands. Are today’s leaders so much wiser and more moral than Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan that they can be trusted with a power that made those men shudder? Let’s hope Americans never find out.

mutinies in the army

army and the government succeeded in suppressing the social unrest and antiwar demonstrations

did not alleviate the supply situation and irritated the Poles

It was impossible for the country to survive another winter of hostilities

In May 1918 a Slav national celebration in Prague demonstrated the strength of the independence movements

Hussarek’s efforts to federalize the empire in the moment of imminent military defeat unintentionally turned out to provide the basis for the formal liquidation of the Habsburg monarchy

where he and Charles had to assure the German emperor, William II, of their unchanging loyalty

The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy was thus consummated by the end of October 1918—that is, before the war actually ended

October 16, 1918, Charles issued a manifesto announcing the transformation of Austria into a federal union of four components: German, Czech, South Slav, and Ukrainian. The Poles were to be free to join a Polish state, and the port of Trieste was to be given a special status. The lands of the Hungarian crown were to be excepted from this program

Burián tried for a separate peace settlement for Austria-Hungary. On October 14, 1918, he sent a note to President Wilson asking for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

He hoped to save the Habsburg monarchy by drawing up a federative structure. Instead, however, he found himself charged with the task of supervising the dissolution of the empire and bringing about an orderly transfer of power

For some days, the government hoped that, in spite of the secession of the Slav areas, the Habsburg dynasty could survive in the remaining lands

the German Austrians had lost faith

Charles adhered to the advice of Lammasch and decided to waive his rights to exercise political authority

The declaration of November 11 marks the formal dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy

“There is more extreme weather in Cognac than there used to be,” said Patrick Raguenaud, president of the BNIC, the governing body of Cognac. “We would sometimes have hail, but not this big.”

Winegrowers have shifted harvest dates forward, and Cognac’s grapes are now removed from their vines in September rather than October. However, this raises concerns that other key flavour characteristics risk being lost. “When we harvest early, we are able to have a correct level of acidity and … sugar,” said Pierre Boyer, deputy cellar master and estate manager at Hine. “But the problem is we are going to have less aromatic components in the grapes.”

A number of estates across the region, overseen by the BNIC, are testing grape varieties that are not currently permitted under the AOC to see if they prove more resilient to global warming and resistant to disease.

“We need to prepare as an industry to be resilient and we need to manage long-term actions – we need to experiment,” said Joncourt. “Then, we need to engage all the stakeholders, all the winegrowers … to … do something really consistent at a regional level.”

As people become permanently poorer, of course, they have less to spend, and a vicious cycle of contraction kicks off — bang! Depression.

Bang! Coronavirus will finish a job that began in earnest about two decades ago: the death of the American middle class.

The trend of mega capitalists building huge, economy-controlling monopolies is likely to be sped along greatly by Coronavirus — as a huge wave of small and medium sized businesses go extinct

Not only will they be trapped, liquidating assets, for months or years, struggling to make ends meet — a lot of them will simply throw in the towel, and decide that the risk of entrepreneurship is too great to take

At the same time, megacorporations will have a field day once all this is over. They’ve got plenty of cash stockpiled — so much they don’t know what to do with. Here’s a golden opportunity for them to buy assets on the cheap

Many of the small and medium sized businesses that are shuttering their doors right about now are probably gone for good. Their owners are going to have declare bankruptcy

In the end, what will be left in the wreckage of such an economy is just a handful of mega corporations controlling most of the economy.

What kinds of jobs do today’s mega corporations offer?

Today, that’s a cruel joke. Americans work like neoserfs — and that trend, too, is accelerating. Jobs — if you’re luck enough to even have one — come with no real benefits, healthcare that barely works, incomes that never really grow much, a retirement package on which you can never retire. But even those McJobs have been becoming, over the last decade or so, something even more dystopian: gigs.

This is the face of a downwardly mobile society — a once prosperous middle class, a once healthy working class, now reduced to being serfs to their technocapitalist overlords, doing their menial and household labour, their everyday chores.

Human possibility. Poof. Up in smoke. That is what has really happened now, as a result of the American government’s stunning failure to support it’s people or economy well enough — at all, really — during a global pandemic.

What happens, by the way, when people finds their hopes dashed, and their dreams shattered? When they live lives of fresh — but seemingly now permanent — poverty? They turn to demagogues and strongmen, in rage, frustration, despair, anger, pain.

This is how an economy dies, my friends. And when an economy dies, a healthy, sane, civilized society tends to go with it. Is that America’s future? Is that already America’s present?

a next-phase division of labor that will continue to combine practical and constitutional considerations. The federal government will issue guidelines for phased screening and social-mitigation practices by states, and attend to national priorities such as economic liquidity, air travel and increased testing capacity. States and localities will take the lead on procedures for reopening schools, churches, restaurants, offices and parks.

It is shaping up to be another round of creative, knowledge-generating federalism.

The most striking aspect of the administration’s response has been its waiving or liberalizing of hundreds of regulatory requirements that would otherwise impede efforts to cope with the epidemic and ensuing shutdowns.

the FDA wasn’t bungling at all: Saying no to new tests and therapies, and delaying them with endless demands for additional data and forms, is standard FDA practice. It is required by statute to certify the safety and efficacy of medical tests, drugs and devices, but it has built its own edifice of overbearing command and control far beyond the statutory requirements.

it will be a great blessing that as soon as the magnitude of the epidemic was grasped, it was managed and subdued through vigorous localism, private enterprise and professional dedication, with the federal government providing essential national leadership but staying within its constitutional rails.

“Plans are worthless but planning is everything,” Dwight Eisenhower observed, because “the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that . . . it is not going to happen the way you are planning.” Diversified centers of authority and initiative aren’t luxuries. They are the keys to resilience in the face of emergencies large and small.

The malaise he analyzes is the result of various forces — economic, institutional, technological, cultural, even biological — coming together to sap us of our strength and hope.

He treats each of these in turn, weighing different hypotheses that might explain us to ourselves

Progressive politics depends on cultivating a sense of solidarity and social obligation, which becomes much harder as families shrink and grow older, and individualism becomes the dominant social fact.

As birthrates decline below replacement, the population ages and there are fewer workers and family members to support retirees with health needs

Our reproductive choices are creating a world where children grow up with fewer siblings and far fewer cousins, cutting them off from natural family networks that offer social support and lessons in getting over themselves

As a genre, social prophecy assumes a pact between author and reader. The author agrees to let his or her imagination loose in the jungle of trends, developments and crises of the moment. The reader agrees to suspend questions and judgments until the end, picking up insights along the way.

In the end he accepts that below-replacement fertility “is the fundamental fact of civilized life in the early 21st century” and that it “looks like an inevitable corollary of liberal capitalist modernity.”

Apart from gay rights, where opinion has genuinely shifted, he believes left and right find themselves pretty much where they were in the 1970s, though less inclined to act.

That might imply the need for public pronatal policies

it might also reflect the paradox that, since the sexual revolution, people have found it harder to pair off into couples and start families

Many conservatives have predicted that ubiquitous internet porn would inspire bacchanalias and violence, but in fact rates of sexual assault, teen sex and teen pregnancy have dropped since its introduction. Saturation, it seems, induces numbness, not desire.

Douthat’s chapters on stagnating innovation and institutional sclerosis as elements of our decadence are more conventional, though informative and well balanced.

Douthat levels the same charge of repetitiveness against our political intellectual culture and expresses a little nostalgia for sharp and sometimes violent confrontations

he keeps digging. He claims that the family size people in the Western world desire is actually higher than that needed for replacement, which suggests that there is an unsatisfied demand for children.

How can he say that ours is a static culture in the age of connectivity, which has accelerated change and turned ours into ever more “liquid societies”? An illusion. It has simply accelerated the circulation of the same tired cultural tropes, leaving us with wheels that turn ever faster in a ditch.

What about the political radicalism and rage exacerbated by social media? Probably just “a kind of digital-age playacting in which young people dissatisfied with decadence pretend to be fascists and Marxists on the internet, re-enacting the 1930s and 1960s with fewer street fights and more memes.”

“It’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.”

The least persuasive pages are devoted to pop culture, which he rightly sees as dull and repetitiv

The coronavirus crisis explodes that 20th-century framework and poses the question: How does America’s central bank supply dollar liquidity to a polycentric world economy?

In 2013, the agreement to swap was made permanent. A privileged group of central banks — those of Canada, Britain, Switzerland and Japan, as well as the European Central Bank — were granted what amounted to unlimited drawing rights on dollars, in exchange for which they would give their own currency as collateral.

But they are also a tool of geopolitics: The dollar network provides a financial safety net for the banks of America’s major allies. It is not by accident that no swap was ever considered for Russia or China.

Three things have changed since 2008. First, dollars are being used on a new scale by new financial actors. Second, the balance of the world economy has further shifted from the European Union-United States-Japan axis toward emerging markets. And third, the politics of the world economy have become far more antagonistic.

As for the growing power of emerging markets, China leads the way. But the growth of economies like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Turkey has also been spectacular. Once a relatively marginal part of the world economy, the emerging economies are now key drivers of global growth

Finally, there is the question of China. In 2008, China was already the main driver of global growt

Today, the country’s economy is larger than ever, as are its holdings of American assets. All told, the foreign debts of China’s businesses come to $1.3 trillion. As the global scramble for dollars begins and the American currency rises in value, those debts become less sustainable. That risks unleashing a chain reaction.

Now the U.S. Treasury market is shaking, and the relationship between the two counties — in an era of viral conspiracy theories and trade wars — has sharply deteriorated. How can the Fed manage relations with China’s central bank in these circumstances?

Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.

Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”

The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.

Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.

for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”

His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”

This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”

I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV

Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.

And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.

Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.

We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death

We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope

If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.

Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either

In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.

When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?

The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops

A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed

he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.

how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.

Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.

It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?

the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country

Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.

There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

As of January 2020, North Korea had 30 to 40 nuclear warheads and could produce enough fissile material for six or seven bombs a year, according to an estimate by the Arms Control Association.

North Korea has extracted plutonium, an atomic bomb fuel, from its Soviet-designed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang.

North Korea’s ballistic missiles can carry nuclear warheads, and the country conducted six increasingly sophisticated underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. The last four of them happened under Mr. Kim.

And at a party congress in January, Mr. Kim doubled down on his nuclear arms buildup, offering a laundry list of weapons he said he planned to develop. They included “multi-warhead” nuclear missiles, “hypersonic” missiles, land- and submarine-launched I.C.B.M.s that use solid fuel, and “ultramodern tactical nuclear weapons.”

By the end of the year, Mr. Kim claimed that his country had the ability to launch a nuclear strike against the continental United States.

In 2017, North Korea made big strides in its weapons capabilities.That year, the country fired its intermediate-range ballistic missile, Hwasong-12, over Japan and threatened an “enveloping” strike around the American territory of Guam.

When North Korea resumed missile tests in 2019 following the collapse of the Kim-Trump talks, the tests featured three new weapons, code-named KN-23, KN-24 and KN-25 by outside experts.

Unlike its older missiles that used liquid fuel, all three of the new missiles used solid fuel. The new solid-fuel weapons, mounted on mobile launchers, are easier to transport and hide and take less time to prepare.

Mr. Kim said in January that his country would also build a nuclear-powered submarine in order to acquire the means to deliver nuclear weapons to its adversaries more stealthily.

North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world, with more than one million soldiers. But much of its equipment is old and obsolete, and the military lacks fuel and spare parts.

North Korea has sought to make up for its shortcomings by building nuclear weapons.

At the January party congress, Mr. Kim said that his weapons program “never precludes diplomacy” but “guarantees its success.” He has also said he no longer holds any expectations for dialogue unless Washington makes an offer that satisfies his government.

It showed that “North Korea was pushing ahead with the plans” set down by Mr. Kim during the party meeting, said Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

These Venus missions could be ready to launch in 2026, but the exact timing is still to be determined. "The best case, if possible, would be if they could launch on a single rocket," Gilmore said.

The VERITAS mission will have an orbiting probe with instruments that will let scientists create detailed 3D reconstructions of the planet's landscape, and will reveal whether Venus has active plate tectonics and volcanoes.

The DAVINCI+ descent probe would sniff in atmospheric gases to measure their composition precisely, and it would be equipped with cameras that could take photos of the surface on the way down.

Much remains mysterious about Venus, even though it was the first planet that NASA explored, in the groundbreaking Mariner 2 mission that flew by Venus in 1962. It was the first time a spacecraft had ever successfully reached another world at a time when the planets were only known by peering at them through telescopes.

While rovers on Mars have sent back lots of vivid panoramas showing the stark beauty of the red planet, images of the surface of Venus are hard to come by. The heat and intense pressure simply obliterate spacecraft.

The last NASA spacecraft sent on a Venus mission was Magellan, which launched in 1989 to map its surface. Its work showed that much of the planet was covered with volcanic flows. The spacecraft burned up in the harsh Venusian atmosphere about 10 hours after being commanded to plunge toward the surface.

Videos posted on social media Wednesday showed thick smoke circulating in the southern areas of the Iranian capital.

Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency said all operations had been suspended at the facility, known as the Tondgooyan refinery, Reuters reported.Some 18 tankers of the refinery caught fire on Wednesday, according to state-run Young Journalists Club (YJC) agency.

This incident came just hours after one of the largest vessels in the Iranian navy caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Oman on Wednesday.

The COVID-19 vaccine that Vaxart is developing is similar to Johnson & Johnson's in that it uses a harmless virus to deliver instructions to cells to make proteins that will prompt an immune response to the coronavirus.

But instead of putting the delivery virus in a liquid, Vaxart freeze-dries it, turning into a powder that can be formulated into a pill that can be stored at room temperature.

Another vaccine that could be self-administered is a nasal spray vaccine.

By contrast, an intranasal vaccine induces two kinds of immunity, Lund says. You still get the systemic protection, she says, "but you will also get immunity directly at the site where you put that vaccine." That makes it harder for the coronavirus to sneak in through the nose.

One way of doing that is to modify something called the spike protein, which prompts the immune response to the coronavirus.

Another possible improvement is the way the spike protein is packaged for delivery in a vaccine.

The immune system of the person receiving the vaccine will react as if it has encountered the real virus when actually it has encountered a harmless mimic. That's the whole trick behind vaccines — getting the body's immune system ready if the real thing comes along.

He says there's some evidence that starting with one kind of vaccine and then switching to another may give better immunity than a single vaccine could do on its own.

In the end, among the most important qualities a new vaccine should have are that it should be able to be made and modified quickly in response to variants, as well as be distributed quickly.

Lurie says it's virtually certain the world will face new and dangerous microbes that will necessitate vaccines that are "safe and effective, fast, easy to use, preferably a single dose."

That way, she says, "when the next one comes, we're much closer to the starting gate than we even were for this one."

Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.

Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.

Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking

The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.

The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them

Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.

we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.

For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.

It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.

These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”

The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.

And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.

Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.

During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.

The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.

over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself

Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.

then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.

To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”

In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.

Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint

Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.

Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.

Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.

Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.

Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.

Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.

For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.

Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say

as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”

After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.

America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.

In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.

Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.

Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.

Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.

there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown

After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.

Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say

Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.

On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result

If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?

an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.

Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.

People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.

Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian

, as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.

The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.

Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism

Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish

For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans

Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.

But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”

“They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did

A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.

Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.

What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed

When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.

Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.

Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.

Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.

Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.

Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.

He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”

indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”

Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.

he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies

I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine

I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations

We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal

do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.

How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?

reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.

Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”

A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.

Carbon capture and storage, which Morgan Stanley says is the only viable option for reducing emissions from coal-fired plants, is another key area and would need almost $2.5 trillion of investment.

to reduce net carbon emissions to zero and meet the Paris Agreement’s goal, the world would have to eliminate 53.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year,

Beyond the social and environmental consequences from failing to act on climate change, going beyond a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius could result in a loss of $10 trillion to $20 trillion of global GDP by 2100, Morgan Stanley predicts.

Within the electric vehicles space, Tesla is the “only pure play”—though they should be followed by VW and Toyota in the long run, while other companies like Panasonic and Albemarle are among the leading players in lithium technology and supply.

For hydrogen, companies to watch include Air Liquide, Siemens and Alstom.

Mr. Breja said he urged Juul’s chief financial officer to issue either a recall or put out product safety warnings. A week later, the complaint says, Mr. Breja was fired.

He also claims that after the F.D.A. raided Juul headquarters in October 2018, seeking internal documents, Mr. Burns instructed Mr. Breja and other executives not to put anything relating to regulatory or safety issues in writing, so that the F.D.A. could not get them in the future.

It is a supremely well-designed little addiction stick.

Soon I was spending a good part of each day enduring pressure headaches brought on by too much nicotine. They would clear up if I went for a walk, but that was easier said than done. Much easier to lie on the couch, helplessly Juuling through my discomfort.

Vaping was making me feel just as bad as smoking. Addiction, whether to cigarettes or alcohol or liquid nicotine, forces you to confront how pathetic and powerless you are, how little agency you have, how the idea of free will is a bad joke in the face of the body’s needs.