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The struggle for the future direction of the party exploded in a manic meeting of the House Republican Conference that ended when Cheney prevailed comfortably in a secret ballot

Greene had earlier learned that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy would not strip her committee assignments

Scared of repudiating Trump's base, the House GOP is racing at top speed towards its extremist fringe to validate millions of Americans living in an alternative reality even if Cheney's survival suggests that privately many GOP members don't believe the election was stolen.

The fact that Cheney has faced more criticism from her colleagues than Greene in recent days reflects how the GOP's traditional values are under siege and the vast power that extremists and conspiracy theories welcomed into the party by Trump are accumulating.

For weeks, and especially following the insurrection incited by Trump on January 6, the Republican Party has been locked in a prolonged duel between those swearing loyalty to their leader in exile

Cheney, who, until the Trump insurrection, was a reliable vote for the President save on some foreign policy issues, made a powerful statement by winning in a 145 to 61 vote to keep her leadership post

Wednesday's turmoil also underscored how McCarthy has capitulated to the extreme forces within his caucus and in the country.

Her victory was a sign that in private at least, there are some in the House Republican Party who are willing to stand up to extremism

But Cheney still faces the very real prospect of a primary challenge in her fervently pro-Trump state of Wyoming

Greene said in the meeting that her past social media posts did not represent who she was. But her sense of being impervious to the customs of her fast-shifting party shone through a defiant interview with the Washington Examiner that published as Wednesday's meeting went on.

"Kevin McCarthy and all these leaders, the leadership, and everyone is proving that they are all talk and not about action, and they're just all about doing business as usual in Washington," Greene said.

In many ways, Wednesday's meeting accelerated the direction the party has been heading at least since many parts of its traditional base became disillusioned with the establishment following years of war and the 2008 financial crisis.

This will all have profound consequences for the country. There have always been wide, and proper, ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans. They are, if anything, widening.

. One of America's great parties, by elevating unhinged radicals such as Greene, and by threatening those like Cheney who accept the truth of Biden's win last year, is implicitly rejecting the sacred values of the American political system itself and its essential underpinning of objective truth and fact.

The Democratic-led House is however expected to act where McCarthy failed in a floor vote on Thursday.

The spectacle of the leader being led around by a congresswoman who has been in Washington for four weeks either showed great political weakness or cynical calculation. He will leave it to House Democrats to rebuke Greene

his failure to deal with the Greene issue himself means that many of his members -- especially those from more vulnerable districts -- now face a choice between voting in the full House to punish a Trump supporter or to open themselves to accusations they are endorsing her crazed rhetoric.

"The voters decided that she can come and serve," McCarthy said after the meeting, adding that Greene had denounced her own social media activity.In her comments to the Examiner, in which she again alluded to lies that Trump won the election and insulted Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, Greene showed she has no incentive to reform her behavior.

"Now, we have Joe Biden in the White House and Nancy Pelosi at 80 million years old as speaker, and we've got a Senate that we don't control anymore, with, you know, Mr. Big Turtle in charge up there just, just losing gracefully, losing gracefully," Greene said

Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger might argue that all is not lost for the GOP and that the reckoning will take many months, as memories fade of the Trump presidency.

But many of those state Republican officials who stood firm in the face of the ex-President's attempt to overturn election results are facing the similar kind of assaults and likely primary challenges as Cheney and the other nine House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

And Republican senators, such as McConnell, who called Greene a "cancer," and others who condemned her remarks would insist that they are standing up for the institutional values of the party

the vast majority of GOP senators are expected to vote to acquit Trump in his Senate impeachment trial

heir motivation is the same as those who are appeasing Greene -- a desire to avoid antagonizing the party base and to avoid primary challenges in order to retain their hold on power.

Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, whose newly released book Hoax explores how Fox News covered Trump, told an interviewer in June that the US had entered an environment “where the Fox base” prefers “propagandistic opinion shows [rather] than any semblance of news”.

“People want to be lied to, and it’s above my head to know what to do about that,” Stelter told the Washington Post. “What do we do about that, when millions of people want to be lied to every day?”

The hysteria is not limited to television. Last week Vice leaked video of a speech by Scott Perry, a Republican congressman and devotee of the false stolen election theory, in which Perry told the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference that they should “go fight them”, referring to Democrats.

Vice reported that Perry claimed many Democrats did not share the same American values as conservatives.

“We can acknowledge that maybe not every one of them is that way, but that doesn’t matter,” Perry said, before drawing a dark parallel.

“We’ve seen this throughout history, right? Not every not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and 40s was in the Nazi party. They weren’t. But what happened across Germany? That’s what’s important. What were the policies? What was the leadership? That’s what we have to focus on.”

The comments by Perry, an influential member of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus, add further context to what experts fear is the current state of the American right – dangerous, intensifying, and with no end in sight.

At the Interior Ministry, where she works, anger has mounted at what is seen as Mr. Cadène’s “laïcité of appeasement,” one that is more concerned with the “struggle against stigmatization of Muslims” than with upholding the Republic against “militant Islamists,” the weekly magazine Le Point reported.

Among the disadvantaged “are a majority of French Muslims, even if the situation is evolving,” Mr. Cadène said. The result, as he sees it, is discrimination that is religious and social: the inferior schools in ghettoized neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities mean Muslim children have fewer chances.

“As laïcité is a tool to allow us all to live together, whatever our condition, it’s also necessary that we be together,” he said. “That we live in the same places. That we interact. And this happens too rarely.” A lot of schools, neighborhoods and workplaces were very homogeneous, he noted. “This insufficient social mixing spurs fears because when you don’t know the other you are more afraid.”

Or it can be philosophical, a form of emancipation against religion, a battle for enlightenment against religious obscurantism, something close to atheism. Islam, with its vibrant appeal to young Muslims, then becomes the enemy

Hakim El Karoui, a Muslim business consultant and senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne, said the problem is that laïcité has many meanings. It can represent the law of 1905, freedom of conscience and the neutrality of the state.

“It would be very dangerous to turn laïcité into a political tool,” he said. “It is not an ideology. It is absolutely not anti-religious. It should be a means to bring people together.”

Mr. Cadène’s views seem broadly aligned with Mr. Macron’s. While condemning the extremist Islamism behind recent terrorist attacks, including the beheading of a schoolteacher, the president has acknowledged failings. In an October speech he said France suffered from “its own form of separatism” in neglecting the marginalization of some Muslims.

Draft legislation this month seeks to combat radical Islamism through measures to curb the funding and teachings of extremist groups. It was a necessary step, Mr. Cadène said, but not enough. “We also need a law of repair, to try to ensure everyone has an equal chance.”

A law, in other words, that would help forge a France of greater mingling through better distributed social housing, more socially mixed schools, a more variegated workplace. The government is preparing a “national consultation on discrimination” in January, evidence of the urgency Mr. Macron accords this question in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election.

In France, saying to someone, “Tell me your laïcité and I’ll tell you who you are,” is not a bad compass.

So, I asked Mr. Cadène about his. “It’s the equality before the state of everyone, whatever their conviction. It’s a public administration and public services that are impartial. And it’s fraternity because that is what allows us to work together in the respect of others’ convictions.”

He continued: “In theory it’s a wonderful model. But if the tool is not oiled it rusts and fails. And the problem today is that equality is not real, freedom is not real, and fraternity even less.”

or many decades the model made French citizens of millions of immigrants, and it remains for many French people of different backgrounds and beliefs and skin color, a noble idea, without which France would lose some essence of itself.

“I believe that our Republic is laïque’’ — secular — “and dedicated to social justice, and that laïcité can only survive on that basis.”

Biden has indicated he intends to proceed with the inaugural -- already curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic -- as planned despite the violence at the Capitol last week.

Bowser told CBS' "Face the Nation" earlier Sunday that she will also ask the Department of Homeland Security to begin their "national special security event" timeline sooner than planned, as well as include the US Capitol in their coverage area for the inauguration.

Bowser ultimately assessed in her letter to Trump that despite the security assets the city has in place, "significant preparedness gaps remain that cannot be remedied without this emergency declaration and direct federal assistance."

the continued determination of the president's most die-hard supporters to fight what they incorrectly perceive as an unfair election has some members of Congress wondering: Will the insurrection continue? And how can they stop it?

Krishnamoorthi says he didn't anticipate how large the crowd outside the Capitol would become or that "the president would incite this mob to march on the Capitol to 'go wild' and instigate the insurrection."

The Washington Post reports that FBI agents are investigating whether some of the Capitol rioters intended not just to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College votes, but also to capture or kill lawmakers.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, warned Saturday that he was notified of a "disturbing report of a death threat" received Friday by the Iowa Democratic Party.

The likelihood of more violence is one of the reasons Twitter permanently suspended President Trump's account

Twitter was particularly concerned by a Trump tweet indicating he wouldn't attend the inauguration. That message "may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a 'safe' target."

Otis, a former CIA analyst, says that extremist groups were likely encouraged by seeing how relatively easy it seemed to be to overtake the Capitol building — and how close participants were able to get to political officials whom they see as enemies.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told CNN that the group was seeing online "chatter" from white supremacists online who feel "emboldened" by the current moment.

In the wake of the Capitol insurrection, Florida lawmakers have proposed a measure that would increase penalties for people arrested during a violent protest.

"We are confident in our security partners who have spent months planning and preparing for the inauguration, and we are continuing to work with them to ensure the utmost safety and security of the president-elect,"

"Charlottesville lie,"

Schoen played a lengthy clip of Trump's widely condemned remarks in which he discussed "very fine people on both sides," accusing the media of having selectively edited Trump's remarks to make it seem like he was excusing racist extremists.

Since 9/11, 114 people have been killed in attacks by right-wing terrorists in the United States vs. 107 by jihadist terrorists, according to data compiled by New America.

Followers of both are drawn to a cause greater than themselves that gives them a shared identity and a mission to correct perceived wrongs, by whatever means necessary. At the core of this cause is a profound sense of victimization and humiliation.

Today’s American extremists think (because they’ve been told by the former president and other leaders) the system is rigged against them and is bent on dismantling everything they believe in.

For both groups, their sense of oppression is built on fantasy. I interviewed many Islamist terrorists with middle-class upbringings, steady jobs and graduate degrees.

Among the rioters who assaulted the U.S. Capitol were doctors, business owners and real estate agents — more victors than victims of the system.

“The militants often experience their humiliations vicariously — ‘our religion is supposedly under attack’ for the jihadis, ‘our race is purportedly under attack’ for the Proud Boys,”

Just as I had countless debates with Muslim extremists convinced that every event and institution (currency movements, the 2004 Iranian earthquake, the CIA, the United Nations) was diabolically conspiring against them, I now find myself having similar mind-numbing arguments with Americans about “deep state” plots, best exemplified by the “stolen” 2020 election and the Mueller investigation.

In both cases, adherents no longer believe that government or institutions will solve their problems. (Annual polling by Gallup shows that confidence in Congress, the presidency, the criminal justice system, newspaper and television news, banks, and big business is at or near historical lows.)

So they feel compelled to take matters into their own hands, even by acts of violence.

Similarly, during the “war on terror” in the Middle East, U.S. officials lamented the lack of public confidence in institutions and promised to fix them, in part to divert recruits away from extremism.

I asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if he ever applied the intelligence community’s metrics for failed states to the United States. “If you apply those same measures against us, we are starting to exhibit some of them, too,” he told me. “We pride ourselves on the institutions that have evolved over hundreds of years, and I do worry about the . . . fragility of those institutions.” He described “legal institutions, the rule of law, protection of citizens’ liberty, privacy” as “under assault.”

the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.

In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.

The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.

There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.

Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.

The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.

“This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”

“Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’

“The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”

But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.

Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.

As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?

“They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.

As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”

He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.

A senior Justice Department official said Wednesday that members of the loosely organized left-wing anti-fascist groups known as Antifa have been involved in violent incidents in at least two states.

The arrests come as law enforcement agencies struggle to keep the peace in the aftermath of Floyd’s death on May 25

Some of the violence is driven by opportunistic looters who started out as peaceful protesters, and some is driven by hardened criminals who are taking advantage of the situation, said the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.

these statements are an apt description of much of American life since Gen Z was born. It has been witness to a financial crisis that deferred or destroyed dreams and wealth with little consequence to those who caused it; the whiplash of the Obama and Trump presidencies; political gridlock; an information ecosystem built atop viral advertising platforms that have democratized information, allowing it to be weaponized to the point of blurring reality; seemingly endless digitally documented police violence; and forever wars. They were born into a time of stark and widening inequality, a time when voter suppression is both called out but rarely acted upon.

Alienation is not a feature of Gen Z experience — it is the overarching context.

it is likely to have profound impacts on their politics and all of our lives.

What, for example, are the results of a year or two of young adulthood lost to social distancing due to a pandemic? Or of graduating into a potential economic depression behind a generation that graduated into a recession?

“ … older generations of liberals are now talking about teens and Kpop fans in the same way that Trump boomers talk about 4chan: as vigilante forces they love but don’t understand.”

Keidra Chaney, a culture writer, who notes that white K-pop fans have received the bulk of credit in the press for the fandom’s anti-racist activism, obscuring the contributions and experiences of black fans. Ms. Chaney told Ms. Ohlheiser that it “feels like a punch in the gut — that we are being used for our social currency and then discarded.”

members of the same generation are most likely also fueling far-right message board trolls, nihilist “Doomer” groups and extremist online communities with a disdain for political correctness. Their platforms of choice like TikTok still brim with unchecked extremist content and far-right conspiracy theories.

s a recent Pew Research Center survey suggests, “members of Gen Z look similar to millennials in their political preferences,” which suggests that online extremism associated with millennials is likely to evolve in this successive generation.

A 2019 Business Insider survey of over 1,800 Gen Zers revealed that a majority did not identify as either conservative or liberal, a result of either indecision or disillusion or both.

The issue here, too, is not one of individual error; it is something that can be referred to as “racist knowledge,” that is, a form of societal knowledge generally widespread and often reinforced across politics and the media. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this racist knowledge legitimizes the differences and inequalities between “us” and “them” – even though democratic principles forbid discrimination of this kind

The Martinique-born psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon once wrote that a society was either racist or not; racism, he argued, was not accidental

when slavery was widely abolished in the 19th century, colonialism simply replaced it as the “better” and supposedly more humane alternative

Subsequently, during the process of decolonization, migration to rich Western countries began, thereby ushering in a new round of exclusion by inclusion

Today, we in the West generally live in societies where racist divisions between “us” and “them” are no longer rooted in direct violence. Yet our markets, legal systems, cultural achievements and knowledge are still shaped to a certain degree by racism.

One encouraging aspect of the West is that it also created a tool with which to combat its own racist past and present, namely democracy.

In heterogeneous democratic societies, different memories must be taken into account, different starting points must be considered and discrimination must be prevented.

Murphy was right the first time: It shouldn't be hard to support peaceful protests for racial justice while unequivocally denouncing looting. But evidently, the easy test proved too hard for him to pass.

If unrest isn’t becoming a vulnerability for Biden, that’s because he has been so much more astute in avoiding Trump’s trap than the young and online. The latter have absorbed the preposterous lesson that to criticize riots (many of which are perpetrated by white political extremists) is to betray the movement for racial justice.

Thankfully, most Black officials and community leaders have ignored online hand-wringing about the perils of criticizing lawlessness. They have wholeheartedly embraced the mass movement for racial justice—and unreservedly condemned the extremists and opportunists who loot stores, burn down neighborhoods, or engage in juvenile fantasies of political revolution.

As long as Biden continues to be as emphatic about his views as he was on Monday, voters will see that his disavowal of violence is sincere. And if they are faced with a decision between a president who is forever making excuses for those who commit violence in his name, and a challenger who is willing to call out the sins of his “own” side, their decision shouldn’t be difficult.

On the ground, the failure to pass this same test has had dire consequences. Authorities in Portland, Oregon, have, in all but the most egregious cases, declined to press charges against protesters who break the law.

if Biden becomes the 46th president of the United States, it will not be despite his failure to understand (what most members of his own party believe to be) the spirit of the moment; it will be because he had the good political judgment to eschew it.

France has the largest population of Muslims in Western Europe

In reality, the ideal often fuels discrimination against those who look, dress or pray differently from the historically Catholic majority

The official French doctrine of colorblindness is intended to ignore ethnic and religious backgrounds

Muslims are disproportionately represented in France’s poorest, most alienated neighborhoods, as well as its prisons

French-born youth were behind much of the worst bloodshed in recent years, many of them linked to the Islamic State group.

France maintains a more hands-on role

economic and cultural ties

visible in how France deploys troops abroad.

French forces intervened in recent years against Islamic extremists in Mali and Syria, both former French holdings.

current anger stems from the recent republication by French satirical newspaper weekly Charlie Hebdo of caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

what distinguishes France most is its unusual attachment to secularism.

France is among the least-religious countries in the world

Secularism is broadly supported by those on both left and right.

As the number of Muslim in France grew, the state imposed secular rules on their practices.

centrist President Emmanuel Macron is a particularly popular target.

He said the planned law was aimed at Islamist “separatism,” which raised fears of the further alienation of French Muslims.

According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”

As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.

last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users.

Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech.

The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents.

“It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats.

In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.”

To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”

And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.

A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult.

Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.

“I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”

Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”

Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence

It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible.

Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.

Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “​​Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”

Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.”

Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.

“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”

What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.

solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.

The ideas that seized the imagination of millions had deep and diverse intellectual roots. For example, the mid-20th century thinker Sayyid Qutb mounted a comprehensive critique of the soulless materialism of America, tracing it in part to the separation of church and state — the fatal error, he believed, that divided the spirit from the flesh. In the Muslim world, he argued, body and soul should not be split asunder, but should live united in a resurrected caliphate, governed by Shariah law.

If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13 percent had a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda.

In his 2011 book, “The Missing Martyrs,” Charles Kurzman showed that fewer than one in every 100,000 Muslims had become an Islamist terrorist in the years since 9/11. The vast majority rejected the enterprise.

When political Islamists tried to establish theocratically influenced rule in actual nations, their movement’s reputation was badly hurt. In one of extremism’s most violent, radical manifestations, the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria became a blood-drenched nightmare.

even in more moderate places, political Islam is losing favor. In 2019, The Economist surveyed the data and concluded, “Across the Arab world people are turning against religious political parties and the clerics who helped bring them to power.

Many appear to be giving up on Islam, too.” Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi of Iran noticed the trend in his own country: “Iranians are evading religious teachings and turning to secularism.”

Globally, terrorism is down. Deaths from attacks fell by 59 percent between 2014 and 2019. Al Qaeda’s core members haven’t successfully attacked the U.S. homeland since 9/11. In 2017, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, began a process of marginalizing radical Wahhabism.

“most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from the glory days of Al Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the ‘near enemy’ (the local regimes) but rather the ‘far enemy’ (the United States and the West more broadly).”

it’s obvious that even local conflicts can create incredible danger. But the idea of global glory — a fundamental shaking of the world order — that burst on the world stage roughly 40 years ago has been brought low.

he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment will arrive” and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 such scientists who had given media interviews, the journal Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats

Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

increasingly, even professors and researchers without much of a public persona have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities.

The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing without connecting them.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “perhaps the worst imaginable perversion” of the idea of walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

A member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that would “cost us our personal freedoms.” QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,” Mr. Moreno said. “This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

The multipronged conspiracy theory quickly became “turbocharged” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, getting extrapolated and becoming this crucible where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbying groups, conspiracist movements, anti-lockdown groups and more saw an opportunity to insert their worldview into the mainstream and to piggyback on the news cycle,”

The vitriol currently directed at Mr. Moreno and researchers like him mirrors “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,”

Modern conspiracy theorists and extremists turn the people they disagree with into scapegoats for a vast array of societal ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an “us-versus-them” environment, she said.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything — as a researcher, my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It is totally unbelievable that we could receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”

there was also something about the presentation and context—the fetishization of violence against innocents, followed by the celebration of violence against innocents—that blunted their emotional effectiveness.

As my network grew, I became desensitized to all the images of wanton cruelty and ultraviolence.

the world of online jihad could have had another effect on the Boston bombers: it might well have inured them to violence. The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw, the more I found that my natural revulsion, usually an uncontrollable instinct, was easier to suppress.

There are now eight Christian families living in St Mary's Church in Amman. It was one of several churches in the Jordanian capital that opened its doors to refugees who arrived paralyzed with fear, and with nothing but the clothes on their back.

"I will never forgive them... I pray that God punishes them for what they did to us."

In a post on Sunday on Let Us Build Pakistan, a blog where Mr. Zaki was an editor, Ali Abbas Taj, the editor in chief, said that Mr. Zaki was killed because of his unwavering campaign against the Taliban and their Sunni extremist allies.

Human rights groups have strongly condemned the killing.

Mr. Butt said militant groups have started singling out activists who have been campaigning on social media against social injustice and religious intolerance.