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Some religious leaders are willing to call good evil, and evil good, in service to a different faith — a faith defined by their political identity. This is heresy at best; idolatry at worst.

Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves. The Trump administration will be remembered for many things. The widespread, infectious corruption of institutions and individuals may be its most damning legacy.

Trump continues his war of words and measuring of egos with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While I still find the threat of a nuclear strike remote, it grows less and less remote with every passing day and every insult. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Kim Jong-un is irrational and unhinged, but so is Trump.

Don’t say that we weren’t warned.

“Donald Trump is dangerous. But not in the way you think. Many people think he’s dangerous. They say, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want somebody like that with such a hot head with his fingers on the nuclear codes.’ And yeah, that’s certainly true. That’s not the real danger. The real danger is that ironically Donald Trump could destroy America’s chance to be great again.”

Something about all these warnings, while true, felt of another time, like they were happening during the Cold War, rather than tailored for an election about the culture wars. Still, a Fox News poll conducted a month before the election found that voters overwhelmingly trusted Clinton to do a better job making decisions about using nuclear weapons.But enough Americans looked past these warnings, just as they pushed past so many others, to hand Trump the election. After all, the nuclear question was theoretical and academic, right? No, it wasn’t.In fact, after the election, concern about Trump controlling our nuclear arsenal only congealed.

Plenty of people tried to warn us about this moment, but not enough Americans took heed. To them, this was sky-is-falling hyperbole. The use of nuclear weapons was a thing of history and Hollywood. Write A Comment But it is ever so clear that the threat is urgent and real and that the only thing standing between a nuclear strike and us is a set of short fingers that constantly type out Twitter insults.If all this makes you uneasy, good. It should. Also, welcome to the club.

"They are using the justification of the 2020 experience -- pandemic and challenges that some states had -- as an excuse to push through on a completely party-line vote, a list of agenda items that they've wanted to do for a long time," LaRose said. He added that as Americans learn more about the bill in the hearing Wednesday they will "start to realize that it is a left-wing activist dream list." 

But Democrats say S.1 is a critical civil rights bill needed to protect Americans' right to vote in the face of GOP-controlled state legislatures that have introduced bills to tighten voting restrictions. 

The second reason why the two plans must be melded into one is political. Democrats will never accept more temporary workers without the legalization of unauthorized foreigners. Republicans will not countenance any type of amnesty if growers, developers, landscapers and the health care industry are not placated by a significantly larger number of legal, low-wage, low-skill workers.

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.”

"Everybody passes the buck," said MacCallum. "I'm waiting for a leader to say we made a mistake," she added, playing a tape of de Blasio accusing the MTA of "fear-mongering" about subway safety issues and remarking that such alleged behavior is happening "at the instruction of the governor."

"The last wave of gun violence was stopped in New York City by proactive policing: Intense, meticulous, proactive policing. I want to bring back stop-and-frisk in a constitutional way," Rivera said. 

While fully embracing QAnon talking points remains a minority position within the GOP, denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election has become the mainstream position inside the party.Read More

Beyond partisanship, belief in QAnon conspiracy theories is also strongly associated with consumption of far-right media, the report finds.

Republicans also say, 54% to 30%, that they agree with the myth that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol "was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad."

In a new Quinnipiac survey, 74% of Republicans say that "too much is being made of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and it is time to move on," compared with just 18% who say that it was an "attack on democracy that should never be forgotten."

A 64% majority of registered voters, including similar shares in both parties, think that political divisions pose a major threat to the United States, per a new Fox News poll.

But under Mr. Trump, who liked to attack the news media as the “enemy of the people,” the practice resurged.

What is new is the role social media (and, to a lesser extent, digital news) plays in both focusing outrage and scaring employers. And this, too, is a problem of economics, not culture. Social platforms and media publishers want to attract people to their websites or shows and make sure they come back. They do this, in part, by tuning the platforms and home pages and story choices to surface content that outrages the audience.

This is not just a problem of social media platforms. Watch Fox News for a night, and you’ll see a festival of stories elevating some random local excess to national attention and inflicting terrible pain on the people who are targeted. Fox isn’t anti-cancel culture; it just wants to be the one controlling that culture.

Cancellations are sometimes intended, and deserved. Some speech should have consequences. But many of the people who participate in the digital pile-ons that lead to cancellation don’t want to cancel anybody. They’re just joining in that day’s online conversation. They’re criticizing an offensive or even dangerous idea, mocking someone they think deserves it, hunting for retweets, demanding accountability, making a joke. They aren’t trying to get anyone fired. But collectively, they do get someone fired.

This isn’t an issue of “wokeness,” as anyone who has been on the business end of a right-wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired — as I have, multiple times — knows. It’s driven by economics, and the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that would lead to a better speech climate for us all.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but our lifelong digital identities are too important to be left to the terms and conditions of a single company, or even a few.

Finally, it would be better to focus on cancel behavior than cancel culture. There is no one ideology that gleefully mobs or targets employers online. Plenty of anti-cancel culture warriors get their retweets directing their followers to mob others.

Unless something that is said is truly dangerous and you actually want to see that person fired from their current job and potentially unable to find a new one — a high bar, but one that is sometimes met — you shouldn’t use social media to join an ongoing pile-on against a normal person.

There have always been things we cannot say in polite society, and those things are changing, in overdue ways. The balance of demographic power is shifting, and groups that had little voice in the language and ordering of the national agenda are gaining that voice and using it.

Slowly and painfully, we are creating a society in which more people can speak and have some say over how they’re spoken of.

Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.”

how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

At most, they stand to lose intraparty offices and, possibly, future primaries. Yet such is the timidity of Republican politicians that these mild threats are apparently enough to make many of them behave like Caligula’s courtiers.

once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”:

the G.O.P. is no longer a normal political party.

it bears a growing resemblance to the ruling parties of autocratic regimes.

The only unusual thing about the G.O.P.’s wholesale adoption of the Leader Principle is that the party doesn’t have a monopoly on power

Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.

As Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein suggests, today’s Republicans are always looking for ways to show that they’re more committed to the cause than their colleagues are — and given how far down the rabbit hole the party has already gone, the only way to do that is “nonsense and nihilism,” advocating crazy and destructive policies, like opposing vaccines.

the G.O.P. has become something different, with, as far as I know, no precedent in American history although with many precedents abroad. Republicans have created for themselves a political realm in which costly demonstrations of loyalty transcend considerations of good policy or even basic logic.

“Had Matt Bevin not ditched his liberty Lt Governor for a Mitch McConnell picked anti liberty, corrupt running mate who has tried to eliminate Kentuckians jury trial rights, had Matt Bevin not presided over a huge sales tax increase, had Matt Bevin supported any of our key issues on criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, expanded gaming, cutting taxes, or acted with the least bit of civility, we probably would not have run a candidate,” the party emphasized.

(Fake News will blame Trump!).

“It’s always better to win than lose obviously but Matt Bevin was a historically unpopular figure running in a state where Democrats have dominated at the state level for the past 100 years. There have only been four Republican governors elected in Kentucky since 1920. Every other statewide candidate won in Kentucky,” he said.

Partisan extremes in the United States have become entirely consequentialist in their ethics. The overriding goal may be the end of Roe v. Wade — or its preservation. It may be passage of gun control legislation — or protection of the Second Amendment. In each case, the objective — always measured in saved lives — means everything.

But if the objective means everything, then how do we judge the character of leaders or the morality of political methods? If ending Roe, for example, is really all that matters, wouldn’t a corrupt or lying politician who opposes Roe always be better than the ideological alternative?

Why should we care? Because democracy is hard to sustain in the absence of certain values. Self-government requires ethical hierarchy — a belief that honor is better than dishonor, fairness is better than exploitation and truth is superior to lies

If political outcomes are truly all that matter, there is no way to draw necessary moral lines.

American freedom is not based on relativism; it is based on the belief that the dignity of human beings is a knowable, universal truth. And the success of that principle is demonstrated in the way we treat each other.

There are categorical commitments to respect and truthfulness that can’t be subordinated to partisan outcomes.

they point to an essential, post-Trump task: restoring a decayed moral environment.

“There’s a statement made by a witness, or an interaction with a lawmaker, and users are able to put together a counternarrative in real time.”

Cameron described the live comment streams as laboratories of right-wing talking points, most likely to attract viewers who already share a certain bias. These viewers are unlikely to change their minds, and thus shift opinion polling on impeachment, which has remained relatively stable.

Social media once held out promise to connect the world. But in a polarized climate, the firmest bonds appear to be forming among those who already share the same views, allowing partisans to choose not simply their own coverage but the community with which they process it. Self-selected information nourishes identity, experts said, reducing politics to entertainment and blood sport.

the Democratic approach rests on more traditional means of persuasion. What committee leaders described as a solemn process, compelled by the president’s own admissions and propelled by “ample facts,” Trump and his congressional allies decried as a charade.

But the talking points are then exported through other channels, he added, and eventually reach persuadable voters. Social media, he said, does not just echo but serves as an “amplifier, with powerful cross-pollination on the different platforms, until the talk eventually reaches the office water cooler or coffee machine, or the Thanksgiving table.”

“The more social media allows for those kinds of communities that make you feel like you’re part of a group that you aren’t physically in, it can give you the illusion that your opinions are more widely held than they really are,”

“That’s a powerful feeling, to be part of a community watching and interpreting something in the same way.”

Discussions about the hearing also appeared on YouTube, where live streams similarly became flooded with conspiracy theories and racist vitriol

The sort of news consumption enabled by the tech giants remains a largely unstudied phenomenon

The phenomenon bears some relationship to talk radio, she said, which allows listeners to call in and share their observations — and to feel as though they’re part of the coverage.

That sense of participation became pronounced over the last few weeks, as the watch parties turned into cheering sections for Republican lawmakers who delivered especially impassioned rebuttals for the president

Trump outperformed Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, in rural parts of Arizona like Mohave County, where Golden Valley is located. Mr. Trump won 58,282 votes in the county, compared to 47,901 for Mr. Romney, though Mr. Romney carried the state by a much bigger vote margin.

Arizona will be a key battleground state in 2020: Democrats already flipped a Senate seat and a Tucson-based congressional district from red to blue in 2018. For Mr. Trump, big turnout from white voters in areas like Mohave County — and in rural parts of other battlegrounds like Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia — could be a lifeline in a tight election.

Grass-roots gatherings play a critical role in the modern culture of political organizing, firing up ardent supporters and cementing new ones. Small circles of Trump-supporting conservatives, often organized online and outside the traditional Republican Party apparatus, engage in more decentralized — and explicit — versions of the chest-beating that happens at Mr. Trump’s closely watched political rallies.

They described Mr. Trump as an inspirational figure who is undoing Mr. Obama’s legacy and beating back the perceived threat of Muslim and Latino immigrants, whom they denounced in prejudiced terms.

The Trumpstock speakers pushed even further, tying Mr. Obama’s middle name to a false belief that he is a foreign-born Muslim

“There is no difference between the democratic socialists and the National Socialists,” said Evan Sayet, a conservative writer who spoke at the event, referencing Nazi Germany. Democrats, he said, “are the heirs to Adolf Hitler.”

This blend of insider and outsider, of mainstream and conspiracy, is a feature of how Mr. Trump has reshaped the Republican Party in his image, and the core of his presidential origin story. Before Mr. Trump announced any firm plans to seek office, he was the national face of the “birther” conspiracy, which thrived in the Tea Party movement and had a significant amount of support from the Republican base, polls showed.

On Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, likely the most watched in the world, he has promoted white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots, and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that top Democrats are worshiping the Devil and engaging in child sex trafficking.

Even mainstream conservative media figures have embraced QAnon as a way to dismiss Mr. Trump’s political enemies. The Fox News host Jesse Watters, during a recent segment dedicated to the conspiracy, linked it to Mr. Trump’s Washington enemies. “Isn’t it also about the Trump fight with the deep state in terms of the illegal surveillance of the campaign, the inside hit jobs that he’s sustained?” he asked.

Leaders of fledgling political groups with names like JEXIT: Jews Exit The Democratic Party, Latinos for Trump and Deplorable Pride, a right-wing L.G.B.T. organization, told the overwhelmingly white audience they were not anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic or racist. In fact, the speakers insisted, people who used those terms were more guilty of bigotry than the people they accused.

Trumpstock attendees say they are used to being denounced, another quality they feel they share with the president. It’s part of why they are protective of him, to the point that they refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a Trump loss in 2020.

Mark Villalta said he had been stockpiling firearms, in case Mr. Trump’s re-election is not successful. “Nothing less than a civil war would happen,” Mr. Villalta said, his right hand reaching for a holstered handgun. “I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

The latest controversy over the Soleimani attack began after Trump told Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Friday night that "I can reveal that I believe it probably would've been four embassies." The Trump administration had previously said that Soleimani was planning "imminent" attacks on US targets before he was killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad, but could not say when and where they might occur.

"I didn't see one with regard to four embassies," Esper said. "What I'm saying is, I share the President's view that probably -- my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies."But in a later Sunday interview with CNN's "State of the Union," Esper said he would not talk about intelligence, possibly in an attempt to avoid coming across as seriously at odds with the President on the question of Soleimani.On "Fox News Sunday" O'Brien also struggled to reconcile Trump's words with intelligence made available to members of Congress.

Democrats are seizing on the confusion and conflicting statements to accuse the President of misleading Americans.House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday he could not recall any mention of purported attacks being planned on four US embassies during a briefing for the select "Gang of Eight" congressional leaders last week.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal told CNN's John Berman on "New Day" Monday that the administration has not offered "a shred of information that there was an imminent threat.""And that's important, John, because imminent threats justify the use of force in a way that 'probably' or 'could have' does not," the Connecticut Democrat said.

"It's not to say that the government is always lying or that the people who run it are inherently evil. It's just that they're human. And these things do happen. And so that's important to ask these questions, to make sure that we know the details."

They ran in different social circles. Where Trump would go to a dinner party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, Bloomberg would go to editor Tina Brown’s house.

“I’m sure Bloomberg has no gold toilets at his house,” said Rebecca Katz, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “It’s a different kind of money with less to prove.”

Bloomberg has seen his national poll numbers rise within the Democratic primary as he’s poured money into advertising for his campaign.

Trump has criticized Bloomberg as well. In early December, Trump mockingly tweeted that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization” to investigate “President Trump, only”.

Trump around that time tweeted: “Little Michael Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!”

“I’m for guns, he’s against guns,” Trump said. Though Trump, in the past, had praised Bloomberg’s positions on guns.

On Friday, it was reported that documents released by House Democrats showed that an aide to Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee and a key Trump ally, worked with Lev Parnas on approaches to Ukraine last year.

As the White House faces into the storm, Dershowitz will join a Trump legal team that also includes Ken Starr, who played a leading role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Jay Sekulow, a Trump lawyer and regular media surrogate, and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, will also represent the president.

No president has been convicted and removed: Clinton and Andrew Johnson survived Senate trials and Richard Nixon resigned before he could be formally impeached. On the BBC, Dershowitz was asked if he thought Trump was a good president and how he felt about potentially facilitating his re-election.

“I’m not going to allow my partisan views to impact my constitutional views and what I think is best for the long term survival of the constitution rather than the short-term partisan advantage of getting my person elected to be president.”

He also said that in the Senate trial he would be “only arguing on behalf of the constitution”. He would answer questions from senators, he said, but would have a “limited role”, as agreed with Trump.

Dershowitz answered: “Let me perfectly clear, I am an advocate … against impeachment. But I’m politically neutral, that is I would make the same argument whether it was a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t let my political preferences interfere with my constitutional analysis.”

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