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Over the course of a week in the summer of 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, not a single Black reporter was featured on the front page of any major publications, the report found.

While the media and other institutions acknowledge that overt racism is unacceptable, many have a limited understanding of its nuances, he said, with people of color expected to provide “a burden of proof,” along with any accusations of racism. Conversations around racism, he said, moved quickly away from “the substantive discussion of racism to whether it’s racist or not and who gets offended.”

The tabloid papers, which Harry and Meghan have blamed for driving them out of the country with their relentless attacks on her, have been noticeably restrained about the interview, media critics have said, apparently avoiding anything that could be construed as racist. Instead, they have focusing mostly on defending Queen Elizabeth II and the monarchy.

the Society of Editors, was forced into an embarrassing about-face after objections from more than 160 journalists of color as well as the editors of both The Guardian and The Financial Times.

“The U.K. media is not bigoted,” and accused Meghan and Harry of an unfounded attack on the profession.

That measure of restraint may be the result of the Mail on Sunday and MailOnline website having lost a recent court case involving the couple.

Meghan, he added, has “put a bomb under all that and everyone is panicking.”

“I remember saying to them that we couldn’t just talk about more people of color in the door, it’s also about the content that’s being put out,” she said.

This does not appear to concern the bills’ sponsors, though. The larger purpose, it seems, is to rally the Republican base—to push back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses.

the Republicans’ bogeyman is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory.

he theory’s proponents argue that the nation’s sordid history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination is embedded in our laws, and continues to play a central role in preventing Black Americans and other marginalized groups from living lives untouched by racism.

in 2020, after Derek Chauvin was captured on video kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and the United States became awash in anti-racist reading lists—some of which included books and articles that discussed critical race theory—Fox suddenly took a great interest in the idea. It became the latest in a long line of racialized topics (affirmative action perhaps being the most prominent) that the network has jumped on

Others, perhaps most prominently Randall Kennedy, who joined the Harvard Law faculty a few years after Bell left, questioned how widely the theory could be applied. In a paper titled “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,” Kennedy argued that white racism was not the only reason so few “minority scholars” were members of law-school faculties. Conservative scholars argued that critical race theory is reductive—that it treats race as the only factor in social identity.

As with other academic frameworks before it, the nuances of critical race theory—and the debate around it—were obscured when it escaped the ivory tower.

The theory soon stood in for anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race. Conservatives would boil it down further: Critical race theory taught Americans to hate America.

oday, across the country, school curricula and workplace trainings include materials that defenders and opponents alike insist are inspired by critical race theory but that academic critical race theorists do not characterize as such.  

For some, the theory was a revelatory way to understand inequality.

Since June 5, 2020, the phrase has been invoked during 150 broadcasts.

Rufo employed the term for the first time in an article. “Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility,’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government,” he wrote.

In early September, Tucker Carlson invited him on his Fox News show during which Rufo warned viewers that critical race theory had pervaded every institution of the federal government and was being “weaponized” against Americans.

Within three weeks, Trump had signed an executive order banning the use of critical race theory by federal departments and contractors in diversity training

Trump’s executive order was immediately challenged in court. Nonprofit organizations that provide these training sessions argued that the order violated their free-speech rights and hampered their ability to conduct their business. In December, a federal judge agreed; President Joe Biden rescinded the order the day he took office

Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing systemic racism

Conservatives are not the only critics of diversity training. For years, some progressives, including critical race theorists, have questioned its value: Is it performative? Is it the most effective way to move toward equity or is it simply an effective way of restating the obvious and stalling meaningful action?

For Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years

a strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of critical race theory or were unsure whether they had.

“Senator Tim Scott denounces critical race theory in his response to Biden’s speech tonight,” he tweeted. “We have turned critical race theory into a national issue and conservative political leaders are starting to fight.”

She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”

I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.

Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.

Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”

Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.

That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.

It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.

The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.

“I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.

The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”

“Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.

But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.

Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?

I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.

Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”

I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.

I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.

The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”

But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.

Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.

The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”

Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.

Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.

Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”

“I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”

But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”

So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?

on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.

he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.

I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.

“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”

Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?

On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”

In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”

McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”

Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.

ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?

unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

"Diplomacy is always our goal. Our goal is to reduce the risk of escalation. But, to date, we have not received any response," Psaki said, noting that the outreach "follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage."

However, experts told CNN prior to Kim Yo Jong's message that Pyongyang was likely to rebuff diplomatic efforts for the time-being for a number of reasons including the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden team's ongoing North Korea policy review, the meetings in the region and above all, the administration's rhetoric.

"That's just a non-starter for the North Koreans," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

North Koreans see several reasons why they should not denuclearize based on recent history, including situations in Iraq, Libya and more recently Iran. Leaders in Iraq and Libya were toppled after relinquishing their nuclear programs under US pressure, while Iran entered a deal with the US only to have the Trump administration withdraw, impose crippling economic sanctions and then assassinate the country's leading general and nuclear scientist.

"It has to be nuanced because you can't just say, you know, we want to have talks, and the talks are going to be about North Korea's complete denuclearization, because that sounds very one sided," he told CNN. "It would have to be long term and not the Libya model of complete denuclearization upfront before we give them anything they want."

But after the summit, Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the agreement pledged North Korea to the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program, despite the fact that it said nothing of the sort.

Former officials and experts also noted that Biden administration officials' commitments not to lift tariffs on North Korea during confirmation hearings did not go unnoticed, which could be one factor driving Pyongyang's decision not to engage directly with the US.

"What if the US and China come out of their meetings this week and make it clear that they are headed for escalating US-China tensions? If you are Kim Jong Un you would read that as meaning that it is less likely that China will put the squeeze on North Korea," said Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council official. "If that happens, maybe Kim now knows he can go to China to buy more pieces for its nuclear programs, or to go to China and sell more coal. That would be a bad sign for the future of any US-North Korea diplomacy."

Aum said that he doesn't think they'd "want to do anything to provoke the US prior to some greater signal that the US is going to take a very hostile approach."

Mr. Biden pushed back on Monday, saying that after years of calling for infrastructure spending that included power lines, internet cables and other programs beyond transportation, Republicans had narrowed their definition to exclude key components of his plan.

Behind the political fight is a deep, nuanced and evolving economic literature on the subject. It boils down to this: The economy has changed, and so has the definition of infrastructure.

Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard University, is working on a project on infrastructure for the National Bureau of Economic Research that receives funding from the Transportation Department.

“Infrastructure is something the president has decided is a centrist American thing,” he said, so the administration took a range of priorities and grouped them under that “big tent.”

“Much of what it is in the American Jobs Act is really social spending, not productivity-enhancing infrastructure of any kind,” R. Glenn Hubbard, an economics professor at Columbia Business School and a longtime Republican adviser, said in an email.

“I couldn’t be going to work if I had to take care of my parents,” said Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “How is that not infrastructure?”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has called the Biden plan a “Trojan horse. It’s called infrastructure. But inside the Trojan horse is going to be more borrowed money and massive tax increases.”

Likewise, Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, said the proposal “redefines infrastructure” to include things like work force development.

The economy has evolved since the 1950s: Manufacturers used to employ about a third of the work force but now count for just 8.5 percent of jobs in the United States.

“Washington has an attention span of several weeks, and this debate is a century old,” he said. These days, he added, it is about digital access instead of clean water and power.

Some economists who define infrastructure more narrowly said that just because policies were not considered infrastructure did not mean they were not worth pursuing.

It's doubtful that the average American grasps those nuances, instead hearing "Russian asset," with respect to Gabbard, as "working for the Russians." There are better ways Clinton might have explained the issue: focusing on Russia as the bad actor and emphasizing its efforts to interfere with American democracy; pointing out that Russia's bolstering of the Gabbard campaign is one data point in this larger effort (it's certainly not the only one). That's the route Clinton should have taken. Instead, she turned the spotlight on a relatively inconsequential congresswoman, and opened up an opportunity for right-wing media scavengers to elevate her.

Gabbard, it should be noted, is polling so badly that she hasn't yet qualified for the November Democratic primary debate. Hillary Clinton, it shouldn't need to be said, is not running for president, and not even in a position to be puppeteering the race from behind the scenes.

Gabbard may very well launch a third-party run, quietly backed by all kinds of nefarious troublemakers. But that run will only be a threat if Gabbard has some fire behind her campaign. Right now, she's flaming out. 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The crusades – the long series of wars fought between 1096 and 1492 under the direction of medieval popes against a wide range of enemies of many different faiths, including Sunni and Shia Muslims – have long been fascinating to the extreme right wing, both in the United States and elsewhere.

The square-limbed crusader cross

is a symbol often spotted on white supremacist marches.

Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women.

Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand, where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping at mosques in Christchurch. The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch.

The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and in which there can only be one victor. Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a way.

In other words, the medieval crusades did indeed contain a clear spine of conflict between Christian and Islamic powers. It is also true that at certain times, these wars were essentially spiritual: that is to say, making war on unbelievers, either through the crusade or its Islamic equivalent, the jihad, was an end in itself. Yet we do not have to look very far at all to realize that the story is rather more complex than it appears.

for all that modern zealots like to paint the crusades as a period of mutual hostility between Christians and Muslims, the truth is that the story was more often one of co-operation, trade and co-existence between people of different faiths and backgrounds.

None of this nuanced history tends to appear in the manifestos of terrorists, or would-be car-bombers. They are content, alas, to perpetuate an idea of the crusades that is binary and zero-sum: an us-or-them narrative designed to justify hatred, racist vitriol, violence and even murder. The medieval crusades were a largely dreadful misdirection of religious enthusiasm towards painful and bloody ends. They were neither a glorious clash of civilizations, nor a model for the world as it is today.

In the three years since Google Brain began making smart recommendations, watch time from the YouTube home page has grown 20-fold. More than 70 percent of the time people spend watching videos on YouTube, they spend watching videos suggested by Google Brain.

The more videos that are watched, the more ads that are seen, and the more money Google makes.

“We also wanted to serve the needs of people when they didn’t necessarily know what they wanted to look for.”

Last week, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s algorithm was encouraging pedophiles to watch videos of partially-clothed children, often after they watched sexual content.

o YouTube’s nuance-blind algorithm — trained to think with simple logic — serving up more videos to sate a sadist’s appetite is a job well done.

The result? The algorithm — and, consequently, YouTube — incentivizes bad behavior in viewers.

the algorithm relies on snapshots of visual content, rather than actions. If you (or your child) watch one Peppa Pig video, you’ll likely want another. And as long as it’s Peppa Pig in the frame, it doesn’t matter what the character does in the skit.

it didn’t take long for inappropriate videos to show up in YouTube Kids’ ‘Now playing’ feeds

Using cheap, widely available technology, animators created original video content featuring some of Hollywood’s best-loved characters. While an official Disney Mickey Mouse would never swear or act violently, in these videos Mickey and other children’s characters were sexual or violent

there’s a 3.5 percent chance of a child coming across inappropriate footage within 10 clicks of a child-friendly video.

Just four in 10 parents always monitor their child’s YouTube usage — and one in 20 children aged 4-to-12 say their parents never check what they’re watching.

At the height of the panic around Mr. Crowder’s videos, YouTube’s public policy on hate speech and harassment appeared to shift four times in a 24-hour period as the company sought to clarify what the new normal was.

One possible solution that would address both problems would be to strip out YouTube’s recommendation altogether. But it is highly unlikely that YouTube would ever do such a thing: that algorithm drives vast swaths of YouTube’s views, and to take it away would reduce the time viewers spend watching its videos, as well as reduce Google’s ad revenue.

it must, at the very least, make significant changes, and have greater human involvement in the recommendation process. The platform has some human moderators looking at so-called “borderline” content to train its algorithms, but more humanity is needed in the entire process.

Currently, the recommendation engine cannot understand why it shouldn’t recommend videos of children to pedophiles, and it cannot understand why it shouldn’t suggest sexually explicit videos to children. It cannot understand, because the incentives are twisted: every new video view, regardless of who the viewer is and what the viewer’s motives may be, is considered a success.

Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.

Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.

The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.

His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.

The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.

The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.

Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago

Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”

While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.

He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.

Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.

The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans.

their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega y Gasset called the “mass man.”

In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” (Emphasis is Ortega’s.)

The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.”ADADThe barbarians are not at America’s gate. There is no gate.

A police union official told the French television station BFM that witnesses had seen the assailant cutting the victim’s throat. The national police were called, officials said, and after having discovered the decapitated victim, confronted the assailant nearby, close to the school. Brandishing a large knife, he threatened the officers, and after refusing to surrender, was shot 10 times, they said.

In the video, the parent details what his daughter told him had transpired in the class.“So this week, he allowed himself to tell them, the Muslims, Muslim students raise your hands,” the parents says. “So they raised their hands, and he said, ‘right, leave the class.’ So my daughter refused to leave and asked him, ‘why?’ And he said he was going to show a photo that would shock them. And then he showed them a naked man, telling them it was the prophet.”

Another parent, Carine Mendes, 41, whose child had attended the class, offered a more nuanced view of what happened. She called the teacher “a very sweet person, in his words, in his expressions.”Ms. Mendes said the teacher had suggested to Muslim students who did not want to see the cartoon that they leave the classroom temporarily, and had asked those who remained not to tell their Muslim classmates about the cartoon in order not to offend their faith.

“He really tried to do things with respect, he didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said.But in a second class where the teacher gave the course, a shocked student refused to leave the room and told her father about what happened. He was the father who later complained in the video posted online.

The next day, the teacher apologized to his students and the principal sent an email message to parents to try to clear up the situation. The teacher’s suggestion to leave the classroom, the principal said, had been insensitive.

“Without wanting to offend anyone, it turned out that by offering this possibility to the students, he still offended the student,” the principal’s email read

Ms. Mendes said that what happened “was awful.”“He was just giving a course on freedom of expression,” she said.

“A teacher was killed just for doing his job,” Sophie Venetitay, a teachers’ union official, told BFM.

The officers were placed on administrative leave after the shooting, a Park Police sergeant told The Washington Post.

A video of the shooting was released in 2018 by Chief Edwin C. Roessler Jr. of the Fairfax County Police Department

He died 10 days later.

The officers have said they acted in self-defense. In 2019, the Justice Department said it would not pursue charges against them because it was unable to disprove the officers’ claim of self-defense. At a news conference on Thursday to announce the indictments, Mr. Descano said this was a “complex and nuanced case” involving “the careful review of 10,000 pieces of documentary evidence, the chasing down of additional evidence and the conducting of in-person interviews” amid a pandemic

In November 2017, what started as a fender-bender turned into a deadly shooting in a matter of minutes. After a brief chase by the police, one of the motorists involved in the crash, Bijan Ghaisar, stopped at a stop sign. Two police vehicles surrounded his car and officers converged. Several shots were fired into his vehicle.

the episode began on Nov. 17 at 7:31 p.m. According to the report, Mr. Ghaisar was driving south on George Washington Memorial Parkway — a federal road — in a green Jeep when he abruptly “stopped in the roadway.” The car behind Mr. Ghaisar then rear-ended him, according to the report, and Mr. Ghaisar drove away.The driver who struck Mr. Ghaisar’s Jeep got a citation for failing to “maintain proper control,” according to the police report, which did not classify the episode as a hit-and-run.

It was not clear why the Park Police sought Mr. Ghaisar, given that they had cited the other driver.

The video captured by the county police begins about six minutes later, at 7:37 p.m. It appears to show the Jeep being pursued by a Park Police car, its lights flashing and sirens blaring. A Fairfax County police officer follows behind.The chase continues along several residential streets. At 7:41 p.m., the Jeep stops at a stop sign, and the Park Police vehicle wheels around in front of it, effectively blocking it.The video then appears to show one officer approach the Jeep’s driver-side door, with a gun drawn and pointed toward the door’s window. The Jeep moves slightly forward, and one gunshot rings out.After a brief pause, three more shots are fired as the car continues to lurch forward. Another officer then approaches, and the sound of a fifth gunshot can be heard on the video.

Two more gunshots can be heard.

Another two gunshots can be heard.

At the news conference on Thursday, Mr. Descano said: “I wish this could have been done in a faster fashion. However, there is no shortcut to justice.”

Weber believed that politics and science do not mix. In the end, political decision-making has to rest on personal judgment – there is no scientific manual to tell leaders what to do.

More to the point, scientists are not well suited to making those decisions. They want the facts to speak for themselves. That is wishful thinking: facts alone cannot tell us what to do.

In politics, expecting the evidence to point the way does not reduce the arbitrariness of the outcome. All political choices are arbitrary to a degree.

The widespread consensus in March that a national lockdown was needed – shared not just by national politicians and their expert advisers, but by the public too – was not primarily driven by the science. It came from a joint conviction that things were getting out of control. Something had to be done

In the spring, Johnson could plausibly claim to speak for the country as a whole when he took drastic action. Now he speaks for almost no one. He is making his own decisions, which is what we pay him to do.

Rebellious Tory backbenchers are demanding that a higher value be put on personal freedom, which is not a scientific concept and cannot be quantified.

Manchester v London is not a problem that can be solved by an algorithm or better stats. But Johnson’s justification for his political choices is still being couched as data-driven. He wants us to think that he hasn’t abandoned the science, he has just got better at reading it.

His problem is that he can’t admit it. He has to pretend that nakedly political judgments – about who gets what, and who pays the price – are being calibrated to a more nuanced understanding of the evidence. He is weighing up a virus whose health impacts are concentrated locally against economic consequences where the effects are national.

The demand for a national “circuit-breaker” lockdown has teeth coming from the Labour leader because it is backed up by an implicit appeal to fairness. If decisions are going to be arbitrary, they may as well be easily understood and apply equally to all.

Current public support for wider measures is driven by a wish to see the same rules for everyone.

Starmer can also claim the backing of Sage. But if that was all he had, it wouldn’t be enough. The facts never speak for themselves. He’s also got personal political conviction to sustain him.

On the other side, Johnson is under attack from those who have had enough of the science altogether.

As a result, Johnson is now vulnerable on two flanks. From one side he can be attacked by Keir Starmer, who is able not only to out-science him but to do it with political conviction

The oldest question in democratic politics is: who gets to speak on behalf of whom? That is why it is so misleading to think that it is the job of politicians to speak on behalf of the evidence

Political legitimacy comes from having a claim to represent the interests of people who cannot otherwise speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, he seems to be waiting for science to come to his rescue. Whether it is a “moonshot” mass testing programme or a vaccine developed by British scientists, Johnson is looking for an unarguable scientific result to get him off the hook.

Even a successful vaccine won’t relieve Johnson of the need to make difficult decisions. How will we determine who gets it first? What will he do about the people who refuse to take it? In the end, science won’t save him. Only politics can do that.

Some of the danger comes directly out of Capitol attack coverage

Instead of that becoming the dominant conversation, the insurrection knocked the story of successful progressive organizing out of our political discussions, once again centering this toxic White supremacist identity and ideology.

Consider law enforcement's differential treatment of armed insurrectionists compared with demonstrators calling for racial equity and the end of police brutality. Take note of the race and class divisions at the heart of the rioters' discontent.

That kind of coverage means we have ended exactly where we started from, with this idea that this moment has been given to us by White, poor, rural people. Such stories erase complicity by upper-middle-class White people and reveal the tendency to turn up our noses at any nuanced portrayal of complicated issues of race, class and power that are actually at play here.

The reductive, monolithic hillbilly narrative sucks the life out of the work, the organizing spaces and even the imaginations of progressive people in Appalachia.

Another really big danger is when White people say, "This is not who we are." It is who we are.

One of the dangers of these myths is that it allows the more genteel White toxicity to feel better about itself.

Some commentators have challenged the portrayal of rioters at the Capitol as "deplorables rising up from the muck of Rust Belt trailer parks" driven by economic anxiety.

All privileged people across the political spectrum profit from the economic anxiety myth, from energy CEOs — guys like Bob Murray — to the ecotourism industry and universities in the region by superficially distancing themselves from White supremacist ideology while also often preserving those same systems for their own benefit.

When you talk about who profits, you also have to think about how this country glorifies work — particularly hard physical labor by White men

This masking is very dangerous and it worries me, because it erases the people who actually do most of the work in this country, while centering a very narrow, heteronormative view of masculinity.

The tendency to blame rural places comes because Appalachia isn't actually powerful. A state like West Virginia carries just five electoral college votes. The fact is that Appalachia and other rural places tell a story that is very pleasing to capitalism: That some people are willing to die for their work.

In this country, we seem to have a morbid need to find examples of people who happily sacrifice themselves for work

Practically speaking, we need to make sure the census is properly counted and make sure that rural progressive organizations are funded and have grant access.

The idea that we can flip a switch and be unified is absolutely ridiculous. That work is hard. We need a reorientation of perspective that helps us to see through the expeditious narratives that are so often sold to us.

That the rules are now dissolving amid ideological double talk from health authorities says something important about the American capacity for political delusion. But it doesn’t prove that we were wrong to implement them

not when there are thousands of people who are still alive, and whose lives emphatically matter, because we sustained restrictions for a time.

he progression I’ve described, though, in which all sides have embraced delusions or found something to value more than public health, does signal that there will be no further comprehensive attempt to fight the virus

Trump and conservatism won’t support it, the public health bureaucracy won’t be able to defend it, and we didn’t use the time the lockdowns bought to build the infrastructure to sustain a campaign of actual suppression.

it will not be political decisions or public health exhortations that save us. On the left and right we’ve exhausted those possibilities, and like the earthlings unexpectedly preserved from alien domination at the end of “The War of the Worlds,” now only some inherent weakness in our enemy can save us from many, many deaths to come.

Biden and Harris, by contrast, talked about the national interest and urged the public to support their plans for the future.

Biden said he will issue a mandate for all Americans to wear masks for a little more than 3 months -- long enough to help halt and reverse the surging infection numbers. "Just 100 days to mask, not forever," he told Tapper. "100 days. And I think we'll see a significant reduction."

That nuanced call to arms is a 180-degree reversal from Trump's steadfast refusal to order the use of masks and his plea to the public back in October

We've had a year of divisive bombast and boasting with Trump claiming the virus would vanish; that he accepted no responsibility for the failed national response; and finally threw up his hands at the over 276,000 deaths from the virus, saying "it is what it is."

"I alone can fix it." Biden and Harris, by contrast, are consistently talking about sharing responsibility with other actors -- Congress, Republicans, governors, and allied nations overseas.

Biden estimated that "we can safely open those elementary schools" -- but at an estimated price tag of $100 billion, which he called on Congress to supply.

"Our Justice Department is going to operate independently," Biden said. "I'm not gonna be telling them to prosecute A, B or C." Another sharp contrast with Trump, who fired his first attorney general and routinely urged his second to go after Trump's political opponents.

Even the relationship between Biden and Harris appears to be based on conversation and consensus rather than firm hierarchy, despite the fact that the two exchanged tough words on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries

Harris pointed to a recent Zoom meeting at which the incoming administration brought together labor leaders and corporate CEOs. "There's a consensus on what needs to be done" to get Americans back to work, she said.

n this case, voters chose to replace the singular, disruptive ego-driven approach of Trump with an administration that understands that the most potent power of an American president is his ability to convene, coax and cajole our vast nation into moving forward together.

"You're not gonna see me making policy by tweets," Biden told Tapper.

That said, the truism is true: Democracy is the least-worst form of government

But the form of government is only a means to an end. And the end result that we want is, roughly speaking, liberalism.

By which I don’t mean AOC-Green New Deal political liberalism, but cultural liberalism: peace, liberty, mutual toleration—basically the goods Mike Lee laid out.

“Democracy” is not always conducive to these good

The results of the democratic election in Germany in July of 1932 were not great for liberalism

So the system the Founders devised was engineered to try to balance out the rights of both the majority and the minority.

Is it okay for 50.1 percent of the people to change the tax code? Yes.

Is it okay for 50.1 percent of the people to create an entirely new social welfare program that fundamentally changes the relationship of the citizenry to the government? No.

nd by “not okay” I mean “likely to cause long-term harm to the body politic.”

changes in reasonably short fashion—but that big changes take time and require much larger majorities.This is a good thing!

Because you’re not in the majority for forever.

Our system was designed so that a small-d democratic majority could govern our society, rather than a tiny minority (the British monarchy). But it was also designed with one eye on the perils of rank majoritarianism and a desire to protect the minority, too.

Whatever hold President Vladimir Putin may have had on Mr. Trump almost never translated into a lifting of sanctions, and Democrats are not likely to seek a reset with Russia. Mr. Trump’s bromance with Kim Jong-un did little to change the U.S. stance on North Korea. Mr. Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was decidedly one-sided, yet there had been no movement toward a two-state settlement in the years before Mr. Trump became president, and there is little indication that any such movement is imminent no matter who’s in the White House — or where the U.S. Embassy is.

In short, the world is not what it was in 2016, nor can it go back to the status quo ante. China is considerably more assertive, and countering Beijing’s aggressions while recognizing its legitimate demands and seeking its help in containing North Korea or reducing carbon emissions will require creative new approaches. So will dealing with a right-wing president in Brazil or a tenacious dictator in Venezuela, or negotiating further nuclear arms reductions with Russia while maintaining sanctions, or trying to placate Israel and several Gulf Arab states while reviving a deal with their archenemy Iran.

Simply abandoning Mr. Trump’s approach is immeasurably important for America and the world. The strength of the United States has always derived as much from the soft power of its democracy, freedoms and values as from its battleships and drones. That strength is multiplied by America’s alliances among democracies in the East and West.

President-elect Biden has signaled that he intends to lead America back into the international arena, and whatever their qualms or doubts, America’s friends and allies should not wait to join forces in tackling the business of the day — a global pandemic and the future of the planet, to name just two items on the agenda.