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The president-elect's insults, made just days ahead of Martin Luther King Day, were the final straw for a number of Democrats who will break with tradition by missing the inauguration ceremony on Frida

"When you insult Rep. John Lewis, you insult America," said Yvette Clarke, one of five representatives for New York who will boycott the event. There are 535 members of Congress, across both houses.

California representative Ted Lieu said: "For me, the personal decision not to attend Inauguration is quite simple: Do I stand with Donald Trump, or do I stand with John Lewis? I am standing with John Lewis."

"I could not look my wife, my daughters, or my grandson in the eye if I sat there and attended, as if everything that the candidate said about the women, the Latinos, the blacks, the Muslims, or any of those other things he said in those speeches and tweets, and that all of that is okay or erased from our collective memory," Mr Gutierrez told the House.

Mr Lewis' announcement of his own boycott in an interview with NBC News, in which he said that Mr Trump was an illegitimate president, prompted the outburst from the president-elect.

"You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong," he told NBC News.

Across rural America, the Rust Belt, Coal Country and other hotbeds of Trumpism, voters have repeatedly expressed frustration that the lazy and less deserving are getting a bigger chunk of government cheese.

More broadly, a recent YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that Trump voters are five times more likely to believe that “average Americans” have gotten less than they deserve in recent years than to believe that “blacks” have gotten less than they deserve. (African Americans don’t count as “average Americans,” apparently.)

We’ve known for a long time, through the work of Martin Gilens, Suzanne Mettler and other social scientists, that Americans (A) generally associate government spending with undeserving, nonworking, nonwhite people; and (B) are really bad at recognizing when they personally benefit from government programs.

Rhetoric this election cycle caricaturing our government as “rigged,” and anyone who pays into it as a chump, has only reinforced these misperceptions about who benefits from government programs and how much.

It’s no wonder then that Democrats’ emphasis on downwardly redistributive economic policies has been met with suspicion, even from those who would be on the receiving end of such redistribution. And likewise, it’s no wonder that Trump’s promises — to re-create millions of (technologically displaced) jobs and to punish all those non-self-sufficient moochers — seem much more enticing.

In other words, Trump must redraw the map.

Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant.

he frames his critique generously, stipulating that it isn’t laziness that’s destroying hillbilly culture but what the psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness” — the fatalistic belief, born of too much adversity, that nothing can be done to change your lot.

What he’s really writing about is despair.

His friends and relations are convinced that the media lies. That politicians lie. That the military, an institution they revere, is fighting two fruitless wars. Universities feel “rigged” and inaccessible; job prospects are slim. For what purpose do you live under such circumstances? When the stanchions of your life have sunk into the muck?

, the reasons are quite a bit deeper than they would have been with Rand Paul. With him, it would have been almost exclusively about foreign policy. With Trump, it’s about much more than that. It’s about basically every value they hold dear.

When Newt Gingrich ran, he claimed that what made America special was its unfettered capitalism.

When Mitt Romney ran for president, he said that what made America exceptional was its mission to defend liberty

in an era of accelerating income equality, American leaders began to acknowledge that when it came to upward mobility, the United States wasn’t actually exceptional at all.

For Obama, what made America exceptional was its ever-expanding circle of inclusion. By overcoming its history of bigotry, and building a society where people of different races, ethnicities and religions lived in harmony, America overcame the tribal hatreds that marred other lands and became a model for the world.

Trump and his advisors say that what sets America apart is its sovereignty. By embracing the European Union, they argue, Europeans stopped valuing nationhood. And as a result, they admitted Muslims who are threatening the continent from within.

On Monday night on Fox News, White House aide Stephen Miller brought up Europe unprompted. “The most important thing to discuss right now,” he told Tucker Carlson, “is how do we keep this country from falling into the same trap as happened to parts of Europe to places like Germany, to places like France, where you have a permanent intergenerational problem of Islamic radicalism that becomes a routine feature of life in those countries, a new normal. How do we keep that from happening in America?”

Trump and his aides, by contrast, place the primary blame for non-integration on Europe’s Muslim immigrants themselves.

Miller suggests that if current trends continue, American Muslims will prove just as dangerous and unassimilable as their European counterparts. It’s a deeply pessimistic vision. Neither Trump nor any of his aides, as far as I know, has proposed policies to help American Muslims embrace opportunity and avoid radicalization

All they’ve done is try to reduce the number coming into the country. The implication is that what will make America exceptional is not its success in integrating Muslims but its success in keeping them out

For Lipset, Bell, Romney, Gingrich, and Obama, what made America exceptional were its people’s habits and ideas. For Trump, what makes America exceptional is the fact that its people are overwhelmingly Jewish and Christian.

For Obama, what made America exceptional was its ability to foster a national identity that transcended tribe and sect. And for Trump? Making America exceptional again requires abandoning that as a dangerous dream.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.

For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.

But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.

Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.

But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.

Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.

Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.

There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.

Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.”

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it. Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship.

As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”

In 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

It is ironic that such historical myopia should be found in Charleston, which today bills itself as one of the nation’s most historic cities. Each afternoon horse-drawn carriages transport tourists about its narrow streets. But as the fight over the Vesey statue suggests, tour guides tell at best an incomplete story.

They often ignore, for example, the fact that of the roughly 400,000 Africans sold into what is now the United States, approximately 40 percent landed on Sullivan’s Island, a hellish Ellis Island of sorts just outside of Charleston Harbor. Today nothing commemorates that ugly fact but a simple bench, established by the author Toni Morrison using private funds.

“If you watch some of the shows that go on during the day, it’s harkening back to the heroic deeds of the Soviet Army, liberating the Crimea and Sevastopol,” said Vladimir V. Pozner, host of a political talk show on Channel One. “You begin to be very antsy — is this the buildup to something else? Is this not preparing the population for what ultimately will be the use of force?

Abby Martin, a Washington-based anchor from Russia Today, a state-owned, English-language cable news network, created a stir by denouncing Russia’s intervention during a broadcast on Monday. Margarita Simonyan, the channel’s editor in chief, sent her a message saying that what she had said was “not in line with our editorial policy,” she said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “We have never made a secret of the fact that we reflect Russia’s position,” she said.

Her decision was followed late Wednesday by the on-air resignation of a second anchor, Liz Wahl, who said she could “not be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin.”In a statement, Russia Today said “the usual course of action” was to address grievances with the editor, or “quit like a professional.” Ms. Wahl’s resignation was, the statement said, “nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.”

Irek Murtazin, a Russian blogger, took umbrage when a state newspaper reported that the upper house of Parliament had “unanimously” approved the use of military force in Ukraine, publishing screen shots that showed that only 90 of the body’s 166 members had voted. “It is a sign that the Russian elite is not as monolithic as it is presented to us,” he said. Ms. Borodina said the fact-checking was a new phenomenon, as bloggers and others turn a critical eye on television.“People just didn’t watch television before,” she said. “Falsifications have always been there.”

The picture in the eurozone is worse: its economy expanded by 2 percent between 2009 and 2010. It is now forecast to expand by a mere 0.4 percent between 2010 and 2013. Austerity has put the crisis-hit countries through a wringer, with huge and ongoing recessions. Rates of unemployment are more than a quarter of the labor force in Greece and Spain (see figure 2).

it did not have to be this way.1. The creditor countries, particularly Germany, could have recognized that they were enjoying incredibly low interest rates on their own public debt partly because of the crises in the vulnerable countries. They could have shared some of this windfall they enjoyed with those under pressure. 2. The needed adjustment could have been made far more symmetrical, with strong action in creditor countries to expand demand. 3. The European Central Bank could have offered two years earlier the kind of open-ended support for debt of hard-pressed countries that it made available in the summer of 2012. 4. The funds made available to cushion the crisis could have been substantially larger. 5. The emphasis could then have been more on structural reforms, such as easing labor regulations and union protections that restrain hiring and firing and raise labor costs, and less on fiscal retrenchment in the form of reduced spending. Reduced labor costs could have made these nations’ export industries more competitive and encouraged domestic hiring.

The ban applies only to national security missions, but the Pentagon’s request has also frustrated those who have pressed to end American reliance on Russia for NASA and commercial spaceflights, at a time when relations between the two countries have become tenser than in any other period since the Cold War.

“I don’t know what the Pentagon’s position can be, except for them and the Obama administration trying to placate Putin,

The Pentagon’s position, however, has powerful support from the nation’s intelligence chief and two of the most influential defense contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

When the House passed its annual defense authorization bill, it approved language that would ease the ban.

The debate is an example of the seismic shift in relations between the United States and Russia, ending a quarter century of tentative and sometimes strained efforts to cooperate.

The arrangement attracted opposition because of Energomash’s majority state ownership and, according to an article by Reuters last year, a minority share tied to one of Mr. Putin’s closest friends, the billionaire Yuri V.

“Certainly we cannot have Vladimir Putin and his cronies profit from the sale of rocket engines,”

The debate over the Russian engines has become entangled in an emerging rivalry among the companies vying for the lucrative business of space launches, amounting to $70 billion in contracts for military and intelligence missions alone

Calls were made for the bishop to resign after he was accused of lying under oath about his spending.

He was criticised for a first-class flight to India to visit the poor.

It was in Germany that Martin Luther launched the Reformation five centuries ago in response to what he said were excesses and abuses within the Church.

Pope Francis has also signalled his intention to clean up the Vatican's finances, appointing a commission to advise him on reforms.

On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants. On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews.

¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation. ¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ. ¶ Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.

In Europe, the courts balance a right to a free press with rights of privacy, of personality, and of dignity, protected in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In America, the implicit right to privacy always fell flat when running against the Supreme Court's fidelity to the First Amendment.

"It's almost absurd to say we have the right to disappear from public domain," said Martin Abrams, a policy director with leading global privacy think tank Hunton & Williams. "We're really talking about the right not to be observed in the first place.... We've been focused on symptoms rather than the underlying issues."

Data will inevitably be out there, Abrams believes, and what matters now is a dialogue about how to retire certain data.

Europe is used to legally processing all its data, whereas America grants far more permissive rights of observation of behavior and its data -- which, when extended to the Internet, affect how companies observe and model our activity. The Europeans resist this digital observation without consent. But the European model runs strongly against American traditions of free press and expression.

Europeans are, Werro continues, equally sensitive to the use of personal images and especially the "merchantability" of personal data by corporations.

the European sensibility is colliding in powerful ways directly with U.S.-based, transnational corporations bred on American values of both expression and profit. The fight is hardly over.

But instead of becoming more isolated, Israel’s government has emerged for the moment as an unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing tumult, now tacitly supported by the leaders of the resurgent conservative order as an ally in their common fight against political Islam.

“Sisi is worse than Netanyahu, and the Egyptians are conspiring against us more than the Jews,” said Salhan al-Hirish, a storekeeper in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. “They finished the Brotherhood in Egypt, and now they are going after Hamas.”

Egypt and other Arab states, especially the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are finding themselves allied with Israel in a common opposition to Iran, a rival regional power that has a history of funding and arming Hamas.

For Israeli hawks, the change in the Arab states has been relatively liberating. “The reading here is that, aside from Hamas and Qatar, most of the Arab governments are either indifferent or willing to follow the leadership of Egypt,” said Martin Kramer, president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and an American-Israeli scholar of Islamist and Arab politics. “No one in the Arab world is going to the Americans and telling them, ‘Stop it now,’ ” as Saudi Arabia did, for example, in response to earlier Israeli crackdowns on the Palestinians, he said. “That gives the Israelis leeway.”

the new Egyptian government and allies like Saudi Arabia appear to believe that “the Palestinian people are to bear the suffering in order to defeat Hamas, because Hamas cannot be allowed to triumph and cannot be allowed to emerge as the most powerful Palestinian player.”

Emwazi challenges the social and moral order. To put it mildly. Far more than, say, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reportedly Iraqi-born ISIS leader challenges the social and moral order.

This is because Emwazi spent most of his life in Britain, in the secular West. Despite his Kuwaiti background and heritage, he was socialized or “acculturated” here, not over there. He went to school here, played football here, went to university here, talked London-street tough here, and wore baseball caps here.

Killers, too, can act in decent and humane ways. It is just that we rarely like to admit it—unless of course they kill in defense of the good, as we subjectively define it.