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some observers are imagining class differences where they do not exist, or exaggerating small differences.

, two recent surveys sponsored by Fox News contain a good measure of general attitudes about the issue: “Which of the following do you think should be the federal government’s priority: limiting the spread of coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, or restarting the economy, even if it increases the risk to public health?

The first survey was conducted Oct. 3-6, when the recent surge in cases was beginning; the second was conducted Oct. 27-29, when it was well advanced.

In the first survey, 36 percent of White voters with a college degree — and 37 percent of Whites without one — thought that restarting the economy should be the priority. In the second survey, 43 percent of White college graduates — and 38 percent without a degree — took that position.

the class differences in both surveys were within the margin of error — they could easily be due to chance — so the safest conclusion is that there is no compelling evidence of a class-based divergence of opinion.

Women were significantly more likely than men to support restrictions, as were people from urban areas.

Support among all groups for restrictions ranged from 17 percent (the proportion who thought outside dining was a bad idea) to 74 percent (in favor of a mask mandate)

On six of the seven questions — all except allowing outside dining — people with a college degree were more likely to favor restrictions, but the differences were very small: 42 percent of people without a college degree thought it was a good idea for students to return to school, for example, compared with 37 percent of people with a degree.

several other demographic characteristics were more closely correlated with attitudes about restrictions than was class

an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll conducted Aug. 3-11 did. It asked about seven kinds of restrictions: keeping students out of school; closing workplaces; preventing large groups from attending religious, social and sporting events; ending organized youth sports; banning indoor dining at restaurants; banning outdoor dining; and mandating mask use nationally

Forty-nine percent of non-Hispanic Whites but only 21 percent of African Americans thought that it was a good idea to have restaurants open for indoor dining

Democrats support restrictions more than Republicans do, and Black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic. But it’s not simply a partisan issue: Even among Democrats, Black support for the restrictions stood out.

contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is not a consistent class difference in views on coronavirus-related restrictions.

On the economic front, the U.S. trade balance was wider than expected, at $67.1 billion for August. Economists were looking for a $66.2 billion deficit, up from a prior reading of $63.6 billion.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according a British think tank.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity." Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month.

"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories.

Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

"It's kinda like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a masters in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."

"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.

That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them."The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."

"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."

"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."

We have to stand together!” He seemed to both sense and reject the idea that Trump has made it hard to do that.

In 2016, the N.F.L. player Colin Kaepernick declined to stand for the pre-game playing of the national anthem, saying that he could not “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color.” Trump won praise from his political base by condemning Kaepernick as un-American.

n 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white-supremacist rally featured the American flag, but most of the marchers carried Confederate flags and swastika banners. After one of the white supremacists plowed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing one of them, Heather Heyer, the far right appeared to rebrand, according to Bethan Johnson, a University of Cambridge scholar and a fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right

Recently, Trump suggested a mandatory year in jail for anyone who desecrates the flag. (Burning or otherwise desecrating the flag is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which Trump had cited in his defense of the flag at Mar-a-Lago.) In August, Trump held the final night of the Republican National Convention, for the first time American history, at the White House; aides built a stage on the South Lawn and loaded it with fifty-four American flags.

Outraged veterans started showing up at the funerals en masse, on motorcycles, to provide protection and emotional support to the families of the dead. They flew American flags on their choppers and drowned out protestors’ chants by revving their engines. These counter-demonstrators became the Patriot Guard Riders, a nonpartisan group with chapters nationwide. The Riders required only that members demonstrate “unwavering respect for those who risk their very lives for America’s freedom and security.” An early leader once said, “We show families in grieving communities that America still cares.”

The flag has represented different ideas at different times in American history: during the Revolution, it was a sign of radical democracy, though the eagle was the more dominant emblem; in the eighteen-forties, it stood for anti-immigration politics; during the Civil War, it was used by both anti- and pro-slavery causes; in the eighteen-nineties, the Pledge of Allegiance was created, and waves of immigrants were given flags as part of their “Americanization”; during the Vietnam era, it was seen as a pro-war symbol. Immediately after 9/11, the flag had a more unifying presence; with the invasion of Iraq, during the Presidency of George W. Bush, it also became synonymous with the U.S. military.

the American flag “moves from one meaning to another.”

Teachout associates the Trump-era use of the flag with a “rhetoric of threat and strength and defense,” and told me that, in certain hands, the flag seems to serve as “a kind of legitimacy” for some of these groups “in terms of how they think of themselves.” Trump’s flag rhetoric rarely involves “the language of sacrifice or shared purpose. It’s about fighting and winning.”

The conflation of Trump and the flag has become so pervasive that progressives have reported feeling reluctant to buy property in areas rife with the flag. Just before the 2018 midterm elections, Bruce Watson, a writer living in western Massachusetts, lamented that liberals and progressives had “shied away from the flag.” He warned that “ceding the nation’s most enduring symbol to one party is just bad politics” and said the flag is “the symbol of ‘we, the people’ ”—including those who “staunchly oppose the president’s policies and behavior.” Watson noted, “Even if it festoons every Trump rally, the flag belongs to all of us.” What Teachout noted more than a decade ago holds true today: “The story of the flag is a story of a country in search of itself.”

The silent majority, if you will,” Hartley said

The people on the bridge had several things in common. All were white. They told me that they get their information from Fox News; the woman from Iowa also listens to Rush Limbaugh. None believed news reports that Trump had repeatedly disparaged members of the military, calling the American war dead “losers and suckers.” Carr said he could not accept that Trump made such comments, then added, “Even if he did say it, look at how much he’s done for us.”

Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose. And so they have learned to think of biased rules as necessary, proper, and just—and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival.

What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

No one has stopped him from defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws. No one has stopped him from hiring and promoting his relatives.

Trump’s clemency to Stone reminded others who might hold guilty knowledge—people like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell—of the potential benefits to them of staying silent about Trump.

How did Trump get away with using a public power for personal advantage in this way? There’s nothing to stop him. The Constitution vests the pardon power in the president.

a second-term Trump could demand that associates break the law for him—and then protect them when they are caught and face punishment. He could pardon his relatives—and even try to pardon himself.

Abuse of Government Resources for Personal Gain

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him,

“No one could do anything to stop him.” No one has stopped Trump from directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses.

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media

No one has stopped him from using government resources for partisan purposes. No one has stopped him from pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign.

No one has stopped him from using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him.

The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

Abuse of the Pardon PowerOn July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses.Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Directing Public Funds to Himself and His CompaniesIn the 230-year history of the United States, no president before Trump had ever tried to direct public dollars to his own companies—so no Congress had ever bothered to specifically outlaw such activity.

Trump’s superpower is his absolute shamelessness. He steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented.

A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity, like wearing cowboy boots during the George W.  Bush administration

The result of this almost-universal Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the neutering of Congress’s ability to act when corruption is disclosed.

Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs, setting a precedent that probably will someday be used against them.

“No one could do anything to stop him.” In his first term, Trump purged the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punished whistleblowers. In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security.

In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Inciting Political ViolenceTrump has used violence as a political resource since he first declared his candidacy, in the summer of 2015. But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people best positioned to regulate the level of political violence in the country are local police, whom Trump has again and again urged to do their work in ways that support him, no matter how “tough” that requires them to be. The police are represented by unions often aligned with the Trump campaign

“I can tell you,” Trump said in a March 2019 interview with Breitbart News, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Trump’s appeal is founded on a racial consciousness and a racial resentment that have stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland

It’s a trick of authoritarian populists like Trump to proclaim themselves leaders of “the people,” even as large majorities of the electorate reject them. The authoritarian populist defines “the people” to exclude anyone who thinks differently. Only his followers count as legitimate citizens.

Legend has it that in the 1870s, “Boss” William Tweed, the famously corrupt New York City politician, taunted his critics by saying, “What are you going to do about it?”* Trump’s relentless defiance of law and decency does the same. Congress has done nothing. So it’s up to voters.

Clemency, as structured by the Constitution, has no check or balance other than politics. And, in yet another political cycle, we are utterly failing to employ that lone check on this power of kings.

The Constitution gives the president sole discretion over clemency, a remarkable and uniquely unchecked power. Historically, at its best, presidents have used it to smooth over the roughest edges of criminal justice.

President Gerald Ford used it to grant thousands of conditional pardons to Vietnam-era draft evaders and deserters after the exigency of that war was over, and President John F. Kennedy used it to shorten the sentences of some sentenced under a draconian marijuana law.

clemency has not been the focus of a question at a presidential debate in the past few decades

no "undecided voter" has pressed a candidate for their views on how the pardon power should be employed.

in the last debate, neither candidate talked about how they would use clemency prospectively, even in a heated discussion on criminal justice.

Trump and Biden present very different issues relating to clemency (which includes the power to shorten sentences through a commutation or forgive convictions through pardons). Trump already has shown his cards: Even taking into consideration the commutations granted last Wednesday to five worthy petitioners, his use of the pardon power has mostly favored friends and Fox News celebrities

While interviewers continually (and appropriately) pepper Trump with questions about whether he will relinquish power if he loses, it is rare that anyone asks him who he might pardon after the election, despite the long and positively bizarre track record he has established.

Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes for 11 of the 18 years examined and just $750 in 2016, the year he won the presidency, and $750 in 2017, his first year in office. Mr. Trump wrote off more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during “The Apprentice” and collected $72.9 million in refunds challenged by I.R.S. auditors. He owes hundreds of millions of dollars due in the next four years.

Mr. Trump, who unlike other presidents since Watergate has adamantly refused to release his tax returns and fought efforts to obtain them all the way to the Supreme Court, attacked the Times report on Monday on Twitter without actually denying any of its particulars.

The Fake News

taking advantage of the tax code is simply “smart” for a business person, while also painting himself as a jobs creator.

Tim Murtaugh, the campaign spokesman, called the report inaccurate because the president has paid “tens of millions in taxes,” without specifying whether they were federal income taxes or directly denying that there were years he paid none.

Fox News.

hairstyling expenses

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted that she paid thousands of dollars in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017 — when she was still working as a bartender in New York City. “He contributed less to funding our communities than waitresses & undocumented immigrants,” she wrote.

Mr. Limbaugh said on his show on Monday that Mr. Trump’s penchant for minimizing his taxes was something to be proud of, not scorned. “He’s a master at this,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “These tax returns show that he is a master at using the tax code legally. If Trump had done all of this illegal stuff after all of these years, it would have caught up with him by now.”

“These folks are scraping to make a living and they’re going to wake up to find out this incredible mogul paid $750? I don’t care what his excuses are,” Mr. Kasich told CNN. “It doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s not going to disrupt those people who were for him totally. They’ll still be for him. But it’s those people on the fence.”

In his tweets, the president seemed to be as upset about the perception that he is not as wealthy and successful as he claims to be.

Fake News

n fact, as the article noted, Mr. Trump is heavily in debt, and much of what he owes to lenders will have to be paid back in just a few years.

At the time, Gates suggests, the campaign did not dwell on whether the answer was undemocratic or problematic but instead on their view that it was effective.

While the Washington establishment thought Trump’s answer was terrible, Gates writes, the campaign viewed it differently: as a statement that would appeal to voters who appreciated “Trump’s breaking with protocol, his ‘fearlessness’ when it came to challenging the status quo.”

People who feel themselves under threat have a high tolerance for cruelty in their leaders: A little savagery to defend the homeland might be a good thing.

But the crucial thing about Donald Trump is that he is not a nationalist who uses immoral means. He is first and foremost an immoralist, whose very being was defined by dishonesty, cruelty, betrayal and cheating long before he put on political garb.

The nationalists relish Trump’s disruption, his savagery. Some everyday conservatives — homeowners, parents, shopkeepers — feel in their bones that some new danger is afoot.

During Tuesday night’s debate, by contrast, people got to see, in real time, how Trump’s vicious behavior destroyed an American institution, the presidential debate. They got to see how his savagery made ordinary human conversation impossible

What Trump did to that debate Tuesday night is what he’ll do to America in a second term.

this election has devolved to certain key questions: Does America still have a moral core, a basic framework that makes this a decent place to live? Will we let Trump and his felons drag us to moral chaos?

In this presidential campaign, Trump’s nationalist platform — trade, immigration — has faded into the background while his immoral nature has taken center stage

You can see this separation in the polls. Fourteen percent of Trump’s 2016 battleground state supporters are not sure they will support him again. Only 16 percent of white evangelicals supported Hillary Clinton in 2016; 28 percent now support Joe Biden, according to an August Fox News poll.

Some Republicans see Trump’s immorality as a sideshow they will tolerate to secure other goods. But his immorality is voracious, a widening gyre that threatens the basic stability of civic life. If he undermines this election, and his Republican enablers let him, he’ll approach what comes next with appalling ferocity.

“There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.”

Conley acknowledged that his evasive answers "came off that we were trying to hide something" but said that "wasn't necessarily true,"

Conley acknowledged that the President has experienced "two episodes of transient drops in his oxygen saturation"

When asked if they had dropped below 90, he replied, "We don't have any recordings here of that." Pressed again on whether they had dropped below 90, Conley said the President's blood oxygen levels didn't get down into "the low 80s."

"There's some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern," Conley said, not explaining whether they were expected findings in a normal patient or a Covid-19 patient.

Some seven months into a pandemic that has killed more than 209,000 Americans, the nation is now facing a grave governing crisis with its commander in chief hospitalized

Late Saturday night, the public learned new details about why Trump was airlifted to the hospital Friday, when chief of staff Mark Meadows said during an interview with Fox News that Trump had a fever on Friday morning and his oxygen level had "dropped rapidly." Meadows added that Trump has made "unbelievable improvements from yesterday morning."

"made substantial progress" since his diagnosis but "is not yet out of the woods."

Speaking from a White House that already has a huge credibility problem with the public, Meadows' statement capped a 24-hour period that served as a master class in opacity and contradiction that raised major questions about the President's health

Trump has been watching and critiquing coverage of his hospitalization from the presidential suite at Walter Reed

Those people told CNN that Trump seemed particularly upset when he saw a quote saying he was displaying "concerning" symptoms on Friday

The President's construct crumbled Friday when he was airlifted to Walter Reed after contracting the virus,

The White House seemed to be continuing to downplay concerns about the severity of the virus Saturday morning when the President's physician, Navy Cmdr. Dr. Sean Conley, gave a news conference at Walter Reed where he described the President as upbeat and feeling good, without revealing any of the alarming developments with his oxygen levels the day before.

Many of the Trump aides or contacts who have recently tested positive for Covid-19 attended the White House festivities honoring Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on September 26, in the Rose Garden.

It "seems highly likely this originated at the SCOTUS announcement last week," a senior administration official told CNN's Jake Tapper of the outbreak among GOP officials. "It may have come from the Hill. The next major concern will be securing Capitol Hill and protecting lawmakers," the official added.

The President said he was "starting to feel good" and that he was receiving therapeutics he said are like "miracles coming down from God."

"I had to be out front and this is America, this is the United States, this is the greatest country in the world, this is the most powerful country in the world," Trump continued in the video. "I can't be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe, and just say, hey whatever happens, happens. I can't do that."

The President tweeted that he had tested positive for coronavirus around 1 a.m. ET Friday, hours after attending a Thursday night fundraiser in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he met with a small group of donors indoors with no masks, before addressing a larger crowd outdoors. Trump got his first positive coronavirus test result Thursday after returning from that trip, a White House official said Saturday evening.

He declined to say whether medical tests had revealed any damage to the President's lungs.

Conley said Trump had been fever-free for 24 hours and had experienced an "extremely mild cough," nasal congestion and fatigue.

"The President's vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We are still not on a clear path to a full recovery," the source later identified as Meadows told pool reporters.

Once Trump was at Walter Reed, doctors initiated the antiviral drug remdesivir. He is receiving a five-day course of the drug, which has been shown to shorten recovery time for some coronavirus patients.

Lankford noted that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bipartisan committee that investigated them found that the compressed time frame for the transition after the contested 2000 election may have contributed to the lack of preparedness for the attack.

In their report after the attacks, the commission said that the dispute over the election and the "36-day legal fight" following "cut in half the normal transition period." The loss of time, the commission said, "hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees,"

The intermediary step by Republicans in the President's orbit illuminated the widening divide between the practical reality that Biden must be equipped with key national security knowledge to begin running the country in January and the political fiction being perpetrated by the President and his supporters.

Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who heads a state the President won last week, said on CNN's "New Day" that "we need to consider the former vice president as the President-elect."

Trump has showed little interest in addressing the most important issue facing the country: the record-breaking climb in US coronavirus cases.

The illusory quality of Trump's election fraud claims was once again underscored by a set of election integrity checks that are being conducted in Arizona, which CNN called for Biden late Thursday night.

post-election audits filed with the Arizona Secretary of State's office from more than half of Arizona's counties showed that there is no evidence of systematic voter fraud or major discrepancies that would affect the outcome of the race.

A group of national, state and private election officials said in a joint statement Thursday that there is no evidence that "any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result," the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said.

The most surreal feature of the suspended reality at the White House is still the behavior of the President himself. A leader who jealously dominated television coverage on the campaign trail and in office has not made public remarks for an entire week

"I'm worried about this virus, I'm not looking at what the merits of the case are. It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States," DeWine said, adding that America needs to "come together as a country."

But the President's Twitter feed Thursday indicated that he was much more fixated on what he views as his mistreatment by Fox News, his once favored network, which he believes should be defending him more vociferously in the midst of the twilight zone that he has created by refusing to acknowledge Biden's victory.

The President, whom CNN quoted sources as describing as increasingly "dejected" on Thursday, continues to tweet falsehoods about election fraud.

there are few signs that his campaign has convinced any court to take his complaints seriously. In this odd limbo between defiance and admitting defeat, the President is wavering between fighting on and a recognition that his hold on power is coming to an end,

While his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have urged their father to continue challenging the election results, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have taken a more measured approach, CNN reported Thursday, encouraging the President to think about potential damage to his legacy as they weigh their own post-White House ambitions.

In addition to Biden's win in Arizona, the President trails in Georgia, where a hand recount is beginning, by 14,000 votes -- a cushion for Biden unlikely to be overturned.

Meanwhile, Biden's political choreography -- which late Wednesday included the naming of Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff -- and his departure to his family beach house to decompress after the election is meant to signal that his ascent to power is assured.

In what may have been a signal to establishment Republicans -- in a venue that the President himself might take account of -- former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote in a Wall Street journal op-ed that the election will not be overturned whatever the result of Trump's legal gambits.

Lankford, who referred to Biden as President-elect at his church last week, has said he will intervene if the victorious Democrat remains unable to access intelligence briefings.

"I've been a little concerned about it," Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe said of the Pentagon firings, adding he'd been told "now it's come to an end."

As Republican lawmakers stake out safe ground -- trying to appear that they are still supporting the President's legal pursuits while also signaling that the transition should begin -- some Democrats have been hammering their GOP colleagues for indulging the President's election fantasies.

"These Republicans are all auditioning for profiles in cowardice," Schumer said.

On Thursday, the US broke the record for Covid-19 hospitalizations for the third consecutive day, surpassing 67,000 hospitalizations.

The glimmer of hope on the horizon continued to be Pfizer's promising announcement earlier this week that their vaccine trial is more than 90% effective with officials widely expecting that the company will apply for emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration before the end of this month.

"By the end of March to early April, we think across all of the vaccines that we have invested in, we have enough for all Americans who wish to get vaccinated," Azar said.

"If you think of it metaphorically, you know, the cavalry is coming here," Fauci said, touting the major positive impact that the vaccines will have."If we could just hang in there, do the public health measures that we're talking about," Fauci said. "We're going to get this under control, I promise you."

Permission to use the additional portions means the limited supply could increase by up to 40%, Politico reported.

Leading health experts say that even if all goes well, the vaccine will not be available to the general public until the end of March or beginning of April.

Inoculations began in the U.S. on Monday with health care workers and the elderly being the first in line to get it.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that a second allotment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be available to the U.S. until next June, given the combination of short supply and global demand.

"It's pretty unusual to have a full extra dose or more though — but it does seem to be there!" Erin Fox, a pharmacist at University of Utah who monitors drug shortages, told the news outlet.

However, because there are no preservatives in the vaccines, partial doses from separate vials shouldn't be combined.

There are conflicting reports about when the U.S. is poised to receive another batch of the medicine from Pfizer.

A vaccine developed by Moderna is expected to get emergency use authorization from the FDA as early as this week. Clinical data shows it is nearly as effective as the Pfizer injections.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's senior official for infectious diseases, told NPR this week that half of all Americans would need to be vaccinated before seeing an impact on the spread of the virus, and that 75% to 85% of the population would need to be vaccinated to create herd immunity. He predicted the U.S. could begin to see early stages of herd immunity by late spring or summer.

The investigation into the Hastings massacres began in 2017 after a Bay Area lawyer, John Briscoe, published an opinion essay in The San Francisco Chronicle under the headline, “The Moral Case for Renaming Hastings College of the Law.”

A number of prominent Hastings alumni, including senior retired judges, disagree and have called for a renaming. They say that like the fortune of the Sackler family, derived from the opioids that ultimately killed multitudes of Americans, the gold Mr. Hastings donated to found the school is tainted.

Native leaders say they hope the Hastings controversy could be a possible catalyst to bring awareness to a terrible legacy that few Californians know about. Greg Sarris, the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a Northern California confederation of tribes, is donating proceeds from his tribe’s casino to fund efforts at the Smithsonian to produce curriculums about Native history, including an Indian perspective on the Gold Rush era.

That period was a particularly treacherous and murderous time in California — “a catalog of slit throats, gunshot wounds and crushed skulls,” wrote Kevin Starr, a California historian.

Brendan Lindsay, author of the 2012 book “Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873,” says ranchers hunted Indians in the way they might track down a fox that ventured into a henhouse.

According to the chronology by Dr. Lindsay, one set of killings was carried out by H.L. Hall, who was hired to look after Mr. Hastings’s cattle and horse ranches in 1858. When four or six — accounts differ — of the nearly 400 horses on the ranch were killed, Mr. Hall and three other men raided a Yuki village and killed nine or 11 tribespeople. During subsequent massacres, he rode into Yuki villages and killed women and children, including the girl he said he killed for “stubbornness.”

one frequently offered explanation is having a desire to serve in the military, but being excluded from doing so.

part of the Oath Keepers’ attraction to disabled veterans like himself is that it offers a way to serve beyond their time in the military, in the absence of other “boots on the ground fraternal organizations” that might provide outlets to carry out a drive to be “guardians and warriors.”

CRT might have started off as an esoteric academic theory about structural racism. But it has now become a generic term for widely publicized excesses in diversity education, such as disparaging “individualism” and “objectivity” as examples of “white supremacy culture” or teaching first-graders about microaggressions and structural racism.

You don’t have to be a Republican to be put off by the incessant attention on race in so many classrooms.

George Packer wrote in the Atlantic in October 2019 that he knew “several mixed-race families” that transferred their kids out of a New York City school that “had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising ‘affinity groups.’”

Packer spoke for many liberal parents when he protested the tendency to make “race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance.” As an example, he cited Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) saying, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

This is the kind of “stupid wokeness” that Democratic strategist James Carville blamed for his party’s setbacks in Virginia and New Jersey — and it is something that Democrats need to disavow if they want to win outside of deep-blue enclaves

Democrats should admit that, even as racism remains a pervasive problem, some efforts to combat it backfire if they exacerbate racial divisions or stigmatize White students.

liberals today need to focus on the collateral damage that Republicans inflict in the name of fighting CRT: They are trying to ban books and fire educators. In short, they are practicing the very “cancel culture” they decry.

Conservatives argue that CRT, with its focus on group identity, is un-American. But what’s more un-American than attempting to ban books and fire teachers for their views? That’s what happens in China. Democrats can win the CRT debate if they call out the illiberal excesses of both the woke left and the anti-woke right.

Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.

We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.

Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.

Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”

The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.

Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.

For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be

In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.

In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998

The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).

Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”

There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.

There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).

Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.

Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.

Two things jump out here:

Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:

even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.

The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.

Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.

The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).

If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism

Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.

Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.

Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.

Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them

Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution

Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.

With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.

a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.

Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.

To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).

It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.

It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.

American politics is often binary.

Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants

There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.

I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.

I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control

I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.

I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.

I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.

I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.

at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.

I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.

I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.

I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?

I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.

I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.

I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.

I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.

I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.

I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.

I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.

I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.

If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.

I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.

I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.

In other words, AOC can win in NY-14 but AOC-type candidates are no solution at all to the Democrats’ working class problems in most areas of the country. The grim fact is that as education polarization has played out geographically, Democratic votes are now distributed so inefficiently that the translation of these votes into political power has been severely undercut

As a result, Democrats’ hold on political power is ever on a knife’s edge even when their last election was a good one (as it is today).

Consistent with other recent research, the study finds that:

Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms.

Candidates whose campaigns focused primarily on universalist policy issues such as jobs, health care, and the economy performed better than those who focused on group-specific policies, such as racial justice or immigration.

In addition, woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics. For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.

easier said than done given Democrats’ recent evolution away from universalist messaging and toward foregrounding the equity effects of unambiguously universal programs and deferring to group specific concerns around race, gender and sexuality, even where they are clearly unpopular and dubious as policy. The result has a been a shift in the Democratic party “brand” that has created barriers to Democratic party voting among broad swathes of the working class.

The grim prospects for the Democrats in 2022 and the gut-wrenching prospect of losing the White House to Donald Trump (again) in 2024 make clear the stakes.

A Democratic brand reset is clearly in order to stop the bleeding among working class voters, along the lines suggested by the Jacobin study. A good way to start would be to embrace widely-held American views and values that are particularly strong among the multiracial working class.

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.

Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.

America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. But crime is a real problem so more and better policing is needed for public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.

There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong.There are basically two genders but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and not settled.

Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.

Besides positively embracing these views it is necessary for major Democratic officeholders and candidates to actively dissociate themselves and their party from the woke stances that contradict these views and tarnish their brand among working class voters. That entails not just saying that one does not endorse now-familiar strands of cultural leftism but in some well-chosen places directly criticizing by name some who hold extreme views that are associated with the Democrats. That will be of great assistance in getting the message through to average working class voters.

these views are entirely consistent with a very progressive Democratic program in the areas of health care, education, social programs, jobs and the economy that would disproportionately benefit the poor and working class, and therefore blacks and Hispanics.

In that sense, one might respond to the inevitable accusation that a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”: who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those who stand in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

And this approach, unlike the Democrats’ current default setting, has the potential to make the Democrats and their progressive policies consistent winners