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Just look at the word "Google," the lawsuit said — it's become "a verb that means to search the internet." What company can compete with that?

"It's been a relationship of extremes,"

a tectonic shift is happening right now: USA v. Google is the biggest manifestation of what has become known as the "Techlash" — a newfound skepticism of Silicon Valley's giants and growing appetite to rein them in through regulation.

"It's the end of hands-off of the tech sector," said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department. "It's probably the beginning of a decade of a series of lawsuits against companies like Google who dominate in the digital marketplace."

For years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Silicon Valley's tech stars have thrived with little regulatory scrutin

There is similar skepticism in Washington of Facebook, Amazon and Apple — the companies that, with Google, have become known as Big Tech, an echo of the corporate villains of earlier eras such as Big Oil and Big Tobacco.

All four tech giants have been under investigation by regulators, state attorneys general and Congress — a sharp shift from just a few years ago when many politicians cozied up to the cool kids of Silicon Valley.

Tech companies spend millions of dollars lobbying lawmakers, and many high-level government officials have left politics to work in tech,

It will likely be years before this fight is resolved.

She said Washington's laissez-faire attitude toward tech is at least partly responsible for the sector's expansion into nearly every aspect of our lives.

"These companies were allowed to grow large, in part because they had political champions on both sides of the aisle that really supported what they were doing and viewed a lot of what they were doing uncritically. And then ... these companies became so big and so powerful and so good at what they set out to do, it became something of a runaway train," she said.

The Google lawsuit is the most concrete action in the U.S. to date challenging the power of Big Tech. While the government stopped short of explicitly calling for a breakup, U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General Ryan Shores said that "nothing's off the table."

"This case signals that the antitrust winter is over,"

other branches of government are also considering ways to bring these companies to heel. House Democrats released a sweeping report this month calling for new rules to strip Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google of the power that has made each of them dominant in their fields. Their recommendations ranged from forced "structural separations" to reforming American antitrust law. Republicans, meanwhile, have channeled much of their ire into allegations that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are biased against conservatives — a claim for which there is no conclusive evidence.

Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration are using those bias claims to push for an overhaul of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, a longstanding legal shield that protects online platforms from being sued over what people post on them and says they can't be punished for reasonable moderation of those posts.

The CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter are set to appear next week before the Senate Commerce Committee at a hearing about Section 230.

On the same day the Justice Department sued Google, two House Democrats, Anna Eshoo, whose California district includes large parts of Silicon Valley, and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, introduced their own bill taking aim at Section 230. It would hold tech companies liable if their algorithms amplify or recommend "harmful, radicalizing content that leads to offline violence."

That means whichever party wins control of the White House and Congress in November, Big Tech should not expect the temperature in Washington to warm up.

Editor's note: Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are among NPR's financial supporters.

The great fear in many quarters abroad is that Trump's budding autocracy was not simply a brutal interregnum, and that Biden's administration is but a brief interlude before America plunges again into the deep spiral that has marked the last four years.

It's likely that much (but not all) of the world has watched not out of pure curiosity or voyeurism but out of horror and fear, that Trump's actions and the fact that only seven of the 50 Republican senators were willing to vote for his conviction -- too few to cross the two-thirds majority threshold needed to convict -- have only accelerated the dimming of democracy and freedom America represented

President Biden was dialing up China's Xi Jinping, reading him the riot act as Trump never did -- warning him that America would no longer ignore gross human rights abuses from Xinjiang to Hong Kong, nor its military's threats from the South China Sea to Taiwan.

A month later, I believe that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via aerosols matters much more than has been officially acknowledged to date.

This confirms the results of a study from late May (not peer-reviewed) in which Covid-19 patients were found to release SARS-CoV-2 simply by exhaling — without coughing or even talking. The authors of that study said the finding implied that airborne transmission “plays a major role” in spreading the virus.

Accepting these conclusions wouldn’t much change what is currently being recommended as best behavior. The strongest protection against SARS-CoV-2, whether the virus is mostly contained in droplets or in aerosols, essentially remains the same: Keep your distance and wear masks.

Rather, the recent findings are an important reminder to also be vigilant about opening windows and improving airflow indoors. And they are further evidence that the quality of masks and their fit matter, too.

here is no neat and no meaningful cutoff point — at 5 microns or any other size — between droplets and aerosols: All are tiny specks of liquid, their size ranging along a spectrum that goes from very small to really microscopic.

Yes, droplets tend to fly through the air like mini cannonballs and they fall to the ground rather quickly, while aerosols can float around for many hours.

The practical implications are plain:Social distancing really is important. It keeps us out of the most concentrated parts of other people’s respiratory plumes. So stay away from one another by one or two meters at least — though farther is safer.

“The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short-range airborne route.”

Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy.

Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasn’t been established.

another, recent, preprint (not peer reviewed) about the Diamond Princess concluded that “aerosol inhalation was likely the dominant contributor to Covid-19 transmission” among the ship’s passengers.

It might seem logical, or make intuitive sense, that larger droplets would contain more virus than do smaller aerosols — but they don’t.

The Lancet Respiratory Medicine that analyzed the aerosols produced by the coughs and exhaled breaths of patients with various respiratory infections found “a predominance of pathogens in small particles” (under 5 microns). “There is no evidence,” the study also concluded, “that some pathogens are carried only in large droplets.”

I believe that, taken together, much of the evidence gathered to date suggests that close-range transmission by aerosols is significant — possibly very significant, and certainly more significant than direct droplet spray.

But basic physics also says that a 5-micron droplet takes about a half-hour to drop to the floor from the mouth of an adult of average height — and during that time, the droplet can travel many meters on an air current. Droplets expelled in coughs or sneezes also travel much farther than one meter.

Wear a mask. Masks help block aerosols released by the wearer. Scientific evidence is also building that masks protect the wearer from breathing in aerosols around them.

When it comes to masks, size does matter.

My lab has been testing cloth masks on a mannequin, sucking in air through its mouth at a realistic rate. We found that even a bandanna loosely tied over its mouth and nose blocked half or more of aerosols larger than 2 microns from entering the mannequin.

Ventilation counts. Open windows and doors. Adjust dampers in air-conditioning and heating systems. Upgrade the filters in those systems. Add portable air cleaners, or install germicidal ultraviolet technologies to remove or kill virus particles in the air.

Avoid crowds. The more people around you, the more likely someone among them will be infected. Especially avoid crowds indoors, where aerosols can accumulate.

We also found that especially with very small aerosols — smaller than 1 micron — it is more effective to use a softer fabric (which is easier to fit tightly over the face) than a stiffer fabric (which, even if it is a better filter, tends to sit more awkwardly, creating gaps).

One study from 2013 found that surgical masks reduced exposure to flu viruses by between 10 percent and 98 percent (depending on the mask’s design).A recent paper found that surgical masks can completely block seasonal coronaviruses from getting into the air.To my knowledge, no similar study has been conducted for SARS-CoV-2 yet, but these findings might apply to this virus as well since it is similar to seasonal coronaviruses in size and structure.

What about the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan early this year? Some 712 of the 3,711 people on board became infected.

Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS-CoV-2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables.Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners.Droplets can’t account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected person’s: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables.But the three tables were in a poorly ventilated section of the restaurant, and an air conditioning unit pushed air across them. Notably, too, no staff member and none of the other diners in the restaurant — including at two tables just beyond the air conditioner’s airstream — became infected.

There was always going to be an intervening event, be it police violence or economic strife, that would reawaken our country’s underlying racial tensions and inequity. In a country with our history – with our present – this might be the most predictable catastrophe in history.

The argument made in 2016 by conservatives who thought that Trump was manifestly unfit for the job went something like this:

Sure, we might get judges and tax cuts. But the potential downside of having a senescent, wannabe gangster as president of the United States is that (1) he might push us into a constitutional crisis and that (2) if he’s confronted with a real-world crisis, there’s a non-zero chance he could cause radical, real-world harm.

Did they really think that putting a man bereft of character, decency, and empathy in charge of the country wouldn’t make a difference?

Did they really think that dismissing each instance of his racism, bullying, fecklessness, megalomania, corruption, lies, and stupidity it wouldn’t have a cumulative effect?

to admit that Trump played any part in bringing us to this moment is to admit culpability for the role they played all the times they covered for him because, you know, Gorsuch. So instead they tweet outrage at the cities on fire and the protestors in the street with a studied blindness to the fact that this is the logical conclusion—to paraphrase John Heilemann—of putting a pyromaniac in charge of a tinder box.

The president’s behavior sets the tone for the country. When the president lacks restraint, he creates permission structures for less restraint from everyone down the chain—politicians, cops, citizens. When the president lacks character, there is a vacuum of leadership. And chaos always fills that void. When the president relishes violence and promises to unleash “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on protesters, we should not be shocked when things escalate.

The people committing that violence should be held accountable for their crimes. But this isn’t an either/or situation. You can hold those people responsible and also hold the president accountable for the toxic atmosphere he has recklessly nurtured.

And you can hold to account the people who, for reasons of either convenience, or ideology, or profit, made themselves willfully blind to what Trump has been doing.

Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters.

in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations

Whether carried aloft by large droplets that zoom through the air after a sneeze, or by much smaller exhaled droplets that may glide the length of a room, these experts said, the coronavirus is borne through air and can infect people when inhaled

But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.

“If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”

In early April, a group of 36 experts on air quality and aerosols urged the W.H.O. to consider the growing evidence on airborne transmission of the coronavirus. The agency responded promptly, calling Lidia Morawska, the group’s leader and a longtime W.H.O. consultant, to arrange a meeting.

But the discussion was dominated by a few experts who are staunch supporters of handwashing and felt it must be emphasized over aerosols, according to some participants, and the committee’s advice remained unchanged.

Dr. Morawska and others pointed to several incidents that indicate airborne transmission of the virus, particularly in poorly ventilated and crowded indoor spaces. They said the W.H.O. was making an artificial distinction between tiny aerosols and larger droplets, even though infected people produce both.

We’ve known since 1946 that coughing and talking generate aerosols,

Scientists have not been able to grow the coronavirus from aerosols in the lab.

Most of the samples in those experiments have come from hospital rooms with good air flow that would dilute viral levels.

In most buildings, she said, “the air-exchange rate is usually much lower, allowing virus to accumulate in the air and pose a greater risk.”

The W.H.O. also is relying on a dated definition of airborne transmission, Dr. Marr said. The agency believes an airborne pathogen, like the measles virus, has to be highly infectious and to travel long distances.

Dr. Marr and others said the coronavirus seemed to be most infectious when people were in prolonged contact at close range, especially indoors, and even more so in superspreader events — exactly what scientists would expect from aerosol transmission.

Experts all agree that the coronavirus does not behave that way.

“We have this notion that airborne transmission means droplets hanging in the air capable of infecting you many hours later, drifting down streets, through letter boxes and finding their way into homes everywhere,”

The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.

Many experts said the W.H.O. should embrace what some called a “precautionary principle” and others called “needs and values” — the idea that even without definitive evidence, the agency should assume the worst of the virus, apply common sense and recommend the best protection possible.

“There is no incontrovertible proof that SARS-CoV-2 travels or is transmitted significantly by aerosols, but there is absolutely no evidence that it’s not,

So at the moment we have to make a decision in the face of uncertainty, and my goodness, it’s going to be a disastrous decision if we get it wrong,” she said. “So why not just mask up for a few weeks, just in case?”

he agency also must consider the needs of all its member nations, including those with limited resources, and make sure its recommendations are tempered by “availability, feasibility, compliance, resource implications,” she said.

if the W.H.O. were to push for rigorous control measures in the absence of proof, hospitals in low- and middle-income countries may be forced to divert scarce resources from other crucial programs.

That’s the balance that an organization like the W.H.O. has to achieve,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘We’ve got to follow the precautionary principle,’ and ignore the opportunity costs of that.”

In interviews, other scientists criticized this view as paternalistic. “‘We’re not going to say what we really think, because we think you can’t deal with it?’ I don’t think that’s right,”

Even cloth masks, if worn by everyone, can significantly reduce transmission, and the W.H.O. should say so clearly, he added.

The W.H.O. tends to describe “an absence of evidence as evidence of absence,” Dr. Aldis added. In April, for example, the W.H.O. said, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”

The statement was intended to indicate uncertainty, but the phrasing stoked unease among the public and earned rebukes from several experts and journalists. The W.H.O. later walked back its comments.

In a less public instance, the W.H.O. said there was “no evidence to suggest” that people with H.I.V. were at increased risk from the coronavirus. After Joseph Amon, the director of global health at Drexel University in Philadelphia who has sat on many agency committees, pointed out that the phrasing was misleading, the W.H.O. changed it to say the level of risk was “unknown.”

But W.H.O. staff and some members said the critics did not give its committees enough credit.“Those that may have been frustrated may not be cognizant of how W.H.O. expert committees work, and they work slowly and deliberately,”

Last week the Republican National Committee launched a digital advertising campaign, raising questions about whether the university is keeping documents under seal related to the Reade allegation. One of the ads alleges: “University of Delaware is complicit in sexual assault cover-up.”

Biden’s defenders argue he is merely following precedent: past senators who ran for president have not been required to disclose all their papers. But Fitton contended: “It’s not that they’re being required; the question is whether the records are available under law. If he had them at his house, maybe there’s an argument, but they’re not at his house. They’re at a university and subject to Foia [Freedom of Information Act].”

“curating the collection”, a process likely to continue well into 2021, and the papers will not be released until two years after Biden retires from public life.

Furthermore, critics on the progressive wing of the Democratic party would be eager to scrutinize Biden’s links to the financial services industry, a big player in Delaware. Conservatives might hunt for documents linking Biden’s son, Hunter, to overseas business interests. In a replay of the 2016 campaign, when he encouraged Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, Donald Trump may welcome a chance to make mischief by demanding “transparency”.

There are practical objections, Sabato added, but Republicans will seek to turn those to their advantage. “First of all, you couldn’t publish it all or even open it all. He had an incredibly long career, a 50-year political career, and there are some personal items in there as well, from what I understand. How could you even manage to make it available to researchers, much less the general public, just a few months ahead of an election? It’s not going to happen.

“His papers from the Senate were at the University of Tennessee and his opponents kept quacking about the fact that we had locked them up, literally, because we didn’t want to go through every morning having some 12-year-old take five words out of a 300-word essay and have to defend it all day.

“So we just said to hell with you, if that’s what the fight is going to be about, then the fight will be about not getting access to the papers as opposed to what’s in the papers. And it’s a little hard to make the case that Biden won’t give up the papers at the University of Delaware while Trump has been in federal court for 27 years to protect his financial records.”

Outside experts said they doubted it was China, which has been accused of trying to steal vaccine information from universities, hospitals and medical researchers, because it would be unlike Chinese hackers to impersonate executives at a major Chinese firm.

If they are correct, the lead suspects would be hackers in Russia and North Korea, both of which have also been accused by the United States of conducting attacks to steal information about the process of manufacturing and distributing vaccines. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between official hacking operations for the Russian or North Korean governments and those run for private gain.

The attackers’ emails were addressed to companies that provide key components of the cold chain process. Those include ice-lined boxes for vaccines and the solar panels that can power refrigerated vaccine containers — an important feature in poor countries where electricity can be scarce.

There is no indication so far that the attackers were aiming at Pfizer or Moderna, whose vaccines are expected to be the first ones approved for emergency use in the United States.

Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has established her credentials as a tough interrogator with her questioning of officials like William P. Barr, the attorney general. She knows how to make a case. But can she attack Mr. Trump’s handling of the virus — which has come to define his presidency — without veering toward an overly personal attack on a president battling a potentially lethal disease?

Mrs. Clinton, the only woman to serve as a major-party presidential nominee, warned Ms. Harris, in so many words, about the corrosive role that sexism will play onstage.

“You should also be prepared for the slights, the efforts to diminish you, you personally, you as a woman, who is about to be our next vice president,” Mrs. Clinton said on her podcast. “So I do think there will be a lot of maneuvering on the other side to try to put you in a box.”

Ms. Harris is not just a woman but also the first woman of color on a major-party ticket.

Don’t look too angry’ line,” Ms. Lawless said. “These are cliché. But they’re cliché because they’re true.”

“She symbolizes everything that ‘Make America Great Again’ wants to push back on by virtue of being a Black woman,” Ms. Lawless said.

(Step 1); moved quickly to talk about the aspirations of a Trump presidency (Step 2); and swung into an attack on the Democrats (Step 3).

because so many vice presidents, and vice-presidential candidates, eventually run for president.

In severe cases, however, the clash between the virus and the immune system rages much longer. Other parts of the body, including those not directly affected by the virus, become collateral damage, prompting serious and potentially life-threatening symptoms

On Friday, the president received an experimental antibody cocktail developed by drug maker Regeneron. The next day he began a course of the antiviral remdesivir. Experts say such treatments might be best administered early in infection, to rein in the virus before it runs amok.

A typical immune response launches its defense in two phases. First, a cadre of fast-acting fighters rushes to the site of infection and attempts to corral the invader. This so-called innate response buys the rest of the immune system time to mount a second, more tailored attack, called the adaptive response, which kicks in about a week later, around the time the first wave begins to wane.

Eventually, a second wave of immune cells and molecules arrives, more targeted than their early counterparts and able to home in on the coronavirus and the cells it infects.

If the innate immune system makes early progress against the virus, the infection may be mild. But if the body’s defenses flag, the coronavirus may continue replicating, ratcheting up the viral load. Faced with a growing threat, innate immune cells will continue to call for help, fueling a vicious cycle of recruitment and destruction. Prolonged, excessive inflammation can cause life-threatening damage to vital organs like the heart, kidneys and lungs.

On Sunday, President Trump’s doctors reported that he had also received a course of dexamethasone, a steroid that broadly blunts the immune response by curbing the activity of several cytokines. Dexamethasone has been shown to reduce death rates in hospitalized Covid-19 patients who are ill enough to require ventilation or supplemental oxygen. But it is far less likely to help and may even harm patients at an earlier stage of infection, or those who have milder disease. Experts say that administering dexamethasone inappropriately, or too soon, could undermine a helpful immune response, allowing the virus to ravage the body.

At 74 years old and about 240 pounds, Mr. Trump occupies a high-risk age group and verges on obesity, a condition that can exacerbate the severity of Covid-19. Men also tend to have a poorer disease prognosis.

This is one of three cases before the Supreme Court involving state mail-in ballot deadlines.

In another case before the Court, North Carolina Republicans asked the Court to intervene after a lower court ruled that the state can count mail-in ballots received up to nine days after Election Day — instead of the usual three — as long as the ballots are mailed by Election Day.

On Oct. 19, an evenly divided court declined a Republican request to stop Pennsylvania from counting ballots received up to three days past Election Day. But the state Republican party returned to the court four days later, asking the justices to hear the merits of the case before Election Day. The addition of new justice Amy Coney Barrett could tilt the balance in their favor, although it's unclear whether she will participate or recuse herself from election-related cases heard so close to her swearing in.

The cases are part of an unprecedented nationwide legal fight between the parties over the rules governing mail-in voting, which has taken on greater significance this year due to the pandemic. Already, more than 62 million Americans have cast early and mail-in votes in what's expected to be a record turnout election. Most of the lawsuits have been brought in battleground states that President Trump won by relatively slim margins in 2016. Whether certain ballots will be counted could make a big difference in this year's outcome, especially in key states like Wisconsin.

The Supreme Court backed the Republican Alabama secretary of state's ban on curbside voting. The Texas Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision blocking Gov. Greg Abbott from limiting the number of ballot delivery sites in the state to one per county. And voting rights groups dropped their effort to expand the number of drop boxes in Ohio after losing in federal appeals court.

“at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.”

I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs.

History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy.

You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces.

“That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”

He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again.

Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K.Or not.

For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.”

“were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ”

Senior leadership of the U.S. government went into a panic. Capitol Hill, too. John Bolton, who was still the national security adviser then, and Virginia Boney, then the legislative affairs director of the National Security Council, hit the phones, calling more than a dozen senators from both parties.

“Is there any way we can reverse this?” he pleaded. “What can we do?”

Mr. Kelly was almost done cleaning out his office. He, too, had had enough. He and Mr. Trump had been at each other every day for months. Later, he told The Washington Examiner, “I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that.”

“I think the biggest shock he had — ’cause his assumption was the generals, ‘my generals,’ as he used to say and it used to make us cringe — was this issue of, I think, he just assumed that generals would be completely loyal to the kaiser,”

In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general, having auditioned for the job with a 19-page memo arguing in various and creative ways that the president’s powers should be exercised nearly without limits and his actions stand virtually beyond review.

“President Trump serves the American people by keeping his promises and taking action where the typical politician would provide hollow words,” she said. “The president wants capable public servants in his administration who will enact his America First agenda and are faithful to the Constitution — these principles are not mutually exclusive. President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve and will always fight for what is best for the American people.”

To replace Mr. Coats, Trump selected Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, a small-town mayor-turned-congressman with no meaningful experience in intelligence — who quickly withdrew from consideration after news reports questioned his qualifications; he lacked support among key Republican senators as well.

There are many scenarios that might unfold from here, nearly all of them entailing weeks or even months of conflict, and giving an advantage to the person who already runs the U.S. government.

“sends letters constantly now, berating, asking for the sun, moon, stars, the entire Russia investigation, and then either going on the morning talk shows or calling the attorney general whenever he doesn’t get precisely what he wants.” The urgency, two F.B.I. officials said, ratcheted up after Mr. Trump was told three weeks ago that he wouldn’t get the “deliverables” he wanted before the election of incriminating evidence about those who investigated and prosecuted his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The speculation is that they could both be fired immediately after the election, when Mr. Trump will want to show the cost paid for insufficient loyalty and to demonstrate that he remains in charge.

Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.

A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe.

Would that mean that Mr. Trump caused any such planned activities or improvisations? No, not directly. He’s in an ongoing conversation — one to many, in a twisted e pluribus unum — with a vast population, which is in turn in conversations — many to many — among themselves.

“stand back and stand by” instructions? Is Mr. Trump telling his most fervent supporters specifically what to do? No. But security officials are terrified by the dynamics of this volatile conversation.

Conservative media could then say the election was being stolen, summoning others to activate, maybe violently. This is the place where cybersecurity experts are on the lookout for foreign actors to amplify polling location incidents many times over, with bots and algorithms and stories written overseas that slip into the U.S. digital diet.

Those groups are less structured, more like an “ideology or movement,” as Mr. Wray described them in his September testimony. But, as a senior official told me, the numbers on the left are vast.

That army Trump can direct in the difficult days ahead and take with him, wherever he goes. He may activate it. He may bargain with it, depending on how the electoral chips fall. It’s his insurance policy.

Inside the Biden campaign they are calling this “too big to rig.”

Races tend to tighten at the end, but the question is not so much the difference between the candidates’ vote totals, or projections of them, as it is what Mr. Trump can get his supporters to believe. Mr. Trump might fairly state, at this point, that he can get a significant slice of his base to believe anything.

There were enormous efforts to do so, largely but not exclusively by the Russians, in 2016, when election systems in every state were targeted.

The lie easily outruns truth — and the best “disinformation,” goes a longtime C.I.A. rule, “is actually truthful.” It all blends together. “Then the president then substantiates it, gives it credence, gives it authority from the highest office,” says the senior government official.

Mr. Trump will claim some kind of victory on Nov. 4, even if it’s a victory he claims was hijacked by fraud — just as he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s three million-vote lead in the popular vote was the result of millions of votes from unauthorized immigrants.

In the final few weeks of the campaign, and during Mr. Trump’s illness, he’s done two things that seem contradictory: seeking votes from anyone who might still be swayed and consolidating and activating his army of most ardent followers.

The F.B.I. has been under siege since this past summer, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The White House is using friendly members of Congress to try to get at certain information under the guise of quote-unquote, oversight, but really to get politically helpful information before the election,”

“They’re the reason he took off the damned mask when he got to the White House” from Walter Reed, the official said. “Those people eat that up, where any reasonable, rational person would be horrified.

You ask it to be refilmed, and you take off your mask, which, in my mind, has become a signal to his core base of supporters that are willing to put themselves at risk and danger to show loyalty to him.”

In 2008, rumors again circulated online that a candidate was being fed answers during a debate. Ann Althouse, a law professor and conservative blogger, wrote that close-up TV stills showed that Barack Obama “was wearing an earpiece” during a debate with John McCain.

Four years later, during the 2004 presidential debates, rumors circulated among left-wing bloggers that George W. Bush was getting help from a surreptitiously placed earpiece.

2000, when Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, accused then-candidate Al Gore of getting answers fed to him through an earpiece during a “Meet the Press” appearance.

In 2016, the rumor appeared again, this time attached to Hillary Clinton, who was accused by right-wing websites of wearing a secret earpiece. (One such story, which appeared on the conspiracy theory website Infowars, was shared by Donald Trump Jr. and other pro-Trump influencers.)

Foreign politicians, including Emmanuel Macron of France, have also been baselessly accused of wearing earpieces during debates.

But the idea of a hidden helper giving one side an unfair debate advantage has proved seductive to campaign operatives trying to explain away a lopsided debate, or sow doubts about cheating on the other side.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday. The President on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene -- basically a request to join the lawsuit

Trump has suggested publicly that he hopes his nominees -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- will side with him on any election dispute.

since Republican delegations outnumber Democratic delegations, Trump would win.

"In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor.

The court has thus far shown no desire to intervene in the presidential election.

On Tuesday, it rejected the plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate the state's presidential tallies. It issued one sentence and noted zero dissents. (Justices don't always have to make their votes public.)

"Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860," Trump's motion to intervene states. "There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law."

First the court would have to allow Paxton to file the suit. Then the court would have to block certification of the Electoral College vote, determine that the four states had allowed massive amounts of "illegal" votes, have the states revisit their vote counts and then resubmit the numbers.

If the court refuses to take up the lawsuit, it's another nail in the coffin for Trump's hopes to reverse his election loss.

If it acts in the other direction, it will be another dramatic and unprecedented turn in the 2020 election, guaranteeing the President will continue to challenge Biden's victory.

"There's nothing unique about Texas' claims here, most of which have already been brought in other suits against the same four states," said Vladeck, noting that if Trump and other states are joining in, it could weaken the suggestion the Texas case is unique.

The GOP "used to be a party for states' rights," Ginsberg said. "I can't imagine something that is less faithful to the principle of states' rights than a Texas attorney general trying to tell other states how to run their elections."

Sen. John Cornyn, the senior Texas Republican, told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?

"Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification," Paxton wrote, officials in the battleground states "usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their state's election statutes." He said they had done so through "executive fiat." He pointed specifically to mail-in ballots, which he said were placed "in drop boxes" with "little or no chain of custody," which weakened signature verification and witness requirements, which he called "the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote."

The court could act after those filings arrive or wait until Texas files a brief replying to the arguments made by the battleground states. The justices acted quickly in rejecting the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Tuesday, but they could bide their time as they have in other election-related cases.

The President's campaign has been represented by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis. In the current motion, however, Trump is being represented by John Eastman.

Trump has also asked GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- the former solicitor general of the state -- to represent him at the Supreme Court in the unlikely event it hears oral arguments.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said Aguirre "crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed."

"His alleged investigation was backward from the start — first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened," Ogg said.

Claims of voter fraud during this year's election — by President Trump, Aguirre and others — have been debunked. Evidence that President-elect Joe Biden won the election hasn't stopped Trump and others from challenging the results in court — an effort that has also repeatedly failed. This week, the Electoral College made Biden's victory official.

Aguirre's scheme was reportedly part of a paid investigation by the Liberty Center group, whose CEO is Republican activist Steven Hotze. It was later discovered that Aguirre was paid $266,400 by the organization for this involvement.

Liberty Center for God and Country's Facebook page says the organization's goal "is to provide the bold and courageous leadership necessary to restore our nation to its Godly heritage by following the strategy that our pilgrim forefathers gave us."

hould be "tarred and feathered" for coronavirus lockdown measures in the state.

ould be "

state

tarred

he had raised more than $600,000 over a three-week period

That fundraising push, Hotze said, "prevented the Democrats from carrying out their massive election fraud scheme in Harris County, and prevented them from carrying Texas for Biden. Our efforts saved Texas."

Aguirre and two other unidentified companions with the Liberty Center watched the victim for four days prior to the Oct. 19 attack, according to police records. They were convinced that there were 750,000 fraudulent ballots in the man's vehicle and home.

Aguirre said the victim was using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because children's fingerprints wouldn't appear on any database, according to the affidavit. He also claimed Facebook's founder gave $9.37 billion for "ballot harvesting."

The victim was driving his box truck during the early morning hours of Oct. 19, when he noticed a black SUV pull into his lane, almost hitting him. A few seconds later, the driver of the SUV later identified as Aguirre, allegedly slammed into the back of the man's vehicle. When the victim pulled over and got out to check on Aguirre, the former police officer allegedly pointed a gun at the victim and demanded he get on the ground.

While Aguirre had his knee into the man's back, according to the affidavit, he ordered two other people arrived on the scene to search the victim's truck. One of them then drove the truck as Aguirre kept the man pinned to the ground. The truck was found abandoned a few blocks away about 30 minutes after the incident. When police searched the victim's truck, only air-conditioner parts and tools were found. No ballots were discovered in the truck or in the man's home. Aguirre was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Ex-Houston Police Officer

An ex-captain in the Houston Police Department was arrested Tuesday for allegedly running a man off the road and assaulting him in an attempt to prove a bizarre voter-fraud conspiracy pushed by a right-wing organization.

All or nothing, nothing or all.

it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.

No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.

It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following

The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed

The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.

Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.

Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, has a neat way of describing the most basic problem in policing Facebook: “At present,” Persily has written, “we do not know even what we do not know” about social media’s effect on the world.

Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights advocacy group Color of Charge, favored another proposed law, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act, which would also require that platforms release data about how they collect and use personal information about, among other demographic categories, users’ race, ethnicity, sex, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability status, in order to show whether their systems are being applied in discriminatory ways.

one idea as “unsexy but important”: Educating the public to resist believing everything they see online.

What we need, then, is something like a society-wide effort to teach people how to process digital information.

In his new book, “Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future,” Robby Soave, an editor at Reason magazine, argues that the media and lawmakers have become too worked up about the dangers posed by Facebook.He doesn’t disagree that the company’s rise has had some terrible effects, but he worries that some proposals could exacerbate Facebook’s dominance — a point with which I agree.

But Soave will probably get what he wants. As long as there’s wide disagreement among politicians about how to address Facebook’s ills, doing nothing might be the likeliest outcome.

as the production of food and material goods centralized and rapidly expanded, commerce reached a scale that the country’s existing stores were ill-equipped to handle, according to the historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Manufacturers needed ways to distribute their newly enormous outputs and educate the public on the wonder of all their novel options. Americans, in short, had to be taught how to shop.

In 2019, one in five American workers was employed in retail, food service, or hospitality; even more are now engaged in service work of some kind.

This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the United States has more service workers than ever before, doing more types of labor, spread thin across the economy

Customers might not have been able to afford a household staff to do their bidding like the era’s truly wealthy, but corporate stores offered them a little taste of what that would be like. The middle class began to see itself as the small-time beneficiaries of industrialization’s barons.

With these goals in mind, Leach writes, customer service was born. For retailers’ tactics to be successful, consumers—or guests, as department stores of the era took to calling them—needed to feel appreciated and rewarded

From 1870 to 1910, the number of service workers in the United States quintupled. It’s from this morass that “The customer is always right” emerged as the essential precept of American consumerism—service workers weren’t there just to ring up orders

they were there to fuss and fawn, to bolster egos, to reassure wavering buyers, to make dreams come true.

they were also quite intentionally building something far grander: class consciousness. Leach writes that the introduction of shopping was fundamental to forming middle-class identity at a particularly crucial moment, as the technological advances of the Gilded Age helped create the American office worker as we now know it.

Retailers won over this growing middle class by convincing its members that they were separate from—and opposed to—industrial workers and their distrust of corporate power,

For many of these workers, the difficulty of finding non-service employment enables companies to pay low wages and keep their prices artificially low, which consumers generally like as long as they don’t have to think about what makes it possible. In theory, these conditions are supposed to encourage better performance on the part of the worker; in practice, they also encourage cruelty on the part of the consumer.

Previously confined to a few lavish European-owned hotels in America, tipping “aristocratized consumption,

Department-store magnates alleviated these concerns by linking department stores to the public good. Retailers started inserting themselves into these communities as much as possible, Leach writes, turning their enormous stores into domains of urban civic life. They hosted free concerts and theatrical performances, offered free child care, displayed fine art, and housed restaurants, tearooms, Turkish baths, medical and dental services, banks, and post offices. They made splashy contributions to local charities and put on holiday parades and fireworks shows. This created the impression that patronizing their stores wouldn’t just be a practical transaction or an individual pleasure, but an act of benevolence toward the orderly society those stores supported.

In the 150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities. Today’s brands insert themselves into current events, align themselves with causes, associate patronage of their businesses with virtue and discernment and success.

Most Americans now expect corporations to take a stand on contentious social and political issues; in return, corporations have even co-opted some of the language of actual politics, encouraging consumers to “vote with their dollars” for the companies that market themselves on the values closest to their own.

For Americans in a socially isolating culture, living under an all but broken political system, the consumer realm is the place where many people can most consistently feel as though they are asserting their agency.

Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.

“The notion that at the restaurant, you’re better than the waiters, it becomes part of the restaurant experience,” and also part of how some patrons understand their place in the world. Compounding this sense of superiority is the fact that so many service workers are from historically marginalized groups—the workforce is disproportionately nonwhite and female.

Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure

If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades

Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”

Tipping ratcheted up the level of control that members of the middle class could exercise over the service workers beneath them: Consumers could deny payment—effectively, deny workers their wages—for anything less than complete submission.

Modern businesses have invented novel ways to exacerbate conflicts between their customers and their workers.

A big problem at airlines and hotels in particular, Wong said, is what’s called the “customer relationship management” model. CRM programs, the first and most famous of which are frequent-flyer miles, are fabulously profitable; awarding points or miles or bucks encourages people not only to increase the size and frequency of their purchases, but also to confine their spending to one airline or hotel chain or big-box store.

Higher-spending customers access varying levels of luxury and prestige, often in full view of everyone else. Exposure to these consumer inequalities has been found to spark antisocial behavior in those who don’t get to enjoy their perks, the classic example of which is air rage

Workers must do what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, identified as “emotional labor.”

Workers must stifle their natural emotional reactions to, in the case of those in the service industry, placate members of the consumer class. These workers are alienated from their own emotional well-being, which can have far-reaching psychological consequences—over the years, research has associated this kind of work with elevated levels of stress hormones, burnout, depression, and increased alcohol consumption.

He entered politics to advocate for traditional or socially conservative beliefs. “He glowed with certain passions—outlawing abortion, preserving family values, fighting bureaucrats on behalf of the little guy—that could not be championed in the stables,” Alberta writes. McBroom stated his position on gun ownership in 2012: “The Second Amendment guarantees our rights to own firearms[,] and I stand strongly for that correct interpretation.”

The American Conservative Union gave McBroom the best marks of any Michigan state senator—voting in line with the organization’s position 95 percent of the time—in 2019, the most recent year of data. By the old rules of political communication, no one is more qualified to be a “credible messenger” to the right-of-center voters of the U.P. than Ed McBroom.

last month, McBroom and three of his senate colleagues—two of them Republicans, only one a Democrat—released their report, and it “crackled with annoyance at certain far-flung beliefs,” writes Alberta:

His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed

thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense. “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” McBroom wrote in the report. “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.” For good measure, McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

“McBroom said he is not fazed by the criticism or the prospect of a primary challenge, which he was already expecting,” notes the Michigan Bridge. “I’ve been totally honest and up front, and if (voters) judge that’s not what they want, and if the majority of them want a different course of action, that’s okay,” he told that publication.

Yet despite three of the four senators who wrote the election report being Republicans; and despite McBroom’s ideological reputation, the product of a decade in Michigan’s state legislature (he was a state rep from 2010 to 2018), and the familiarity of the McBroom family name, and McBroom’s culturally Christian values—despite all that, his political standing is still taking a hit.

Trump trashed McBroom and the state senate president, Republican Mike Shirkey. He published their office phone numbers. He urged people to “vote them the hell out of office.”

more to the point about credible messengers is this: McBroom said that he’s felt heat from people he knows—allies of his—not just randos on social media. “It’s been very discouraging, and very sad, to have people I know who have supported me, and always said they respected me and found me to be honest, who suddenly don’t trust me because of what some guy told them on the internet,” he told Alberta.

So thorough were the authors’ conclusions that they recommended “the [state] attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County,” where an obvious and brief reporting error showed Biden thumping Trump, “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

What McBroom clarified is this:

Trump’s base is the animating force of the Republican party, which holds GOP officials accountable mostly for their accountability to Trump. To this group, there is no such thing as a credible critic of the former president.

the unanswered question that confronts coalition-builders today is how to reach a movement for which all reasoning is motivated reasoning; for which facts and proof are subjective

The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left

a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about

For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control.

By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers.

Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents.

Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group.

Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course.

The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary

That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice

It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.

Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals

it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means

And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.

populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen

Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.

Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.

Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion

Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies.