<....Yet it was neither Biden nor Trump who ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to begin with, or mismanaged it to the point that it was sometimes called “the forgotten war,” even as American troops fought and died in it. It was Bush, who was so popular in the wake of 9/11 that the American media made a “rock star” out of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his feisty press conferences, even as he was failing to take the steps that would have brought Al Qaeda’s leadership to swift justice.

And despite presiding over the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, voters rewarded Bush in the 2002 with a rare sweeping victory for the incumbent president’s party in Congress. The idea that Republican politicians and voters opposed America’s Republican-led war footing in the early 2000s is fanciful, to put it kindly.

For all that has happened since then, 9/11 remains the hinge moment for the American project. In one of the most trenchant analyses I’ve read of the terror attacks, columnist Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times wrote in 2021, “The attacks, and our response to them, catalyzed a period of decline that helped turn the United States into the debased, half-crazed fading power we are today. America launched a bad-faith global crusade to instill democracy in the Muslim world and ended up with our own democracy in tatters.”

In his powerful book “Reign of Terror,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman draws a direct line between the militarism that began on 9/11 and the assault on American democracy that took place on Jan. 6, 2021. So many other of the nation’s ills — xenophobia, paranoia, polarization, addiction — began with or were accelerated by Bush’s misbegotten war on “evildoers.”

But if you listened to Vance’s speech, and watched the reactions of the GOP delegates in the crowd in Milwaukee, you’d never know that it was Republican politicians and voters who pushed America into two long, disastrous wars.

Until they acknowledge their own responsibility for the damage those wars caused our reputations — not to mention the lives they took — they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Then again, maybe being taken seriously is no longer something they crave.>

<On the third night of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump's WWE-inspired entrance came complete with a trollish musical cue, James Brown's infamous ode to traditional gender hierarchies, "It's A Man's Man's Man's World."

Earlier that day, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., learned the song's lesson the hard way. The once-soaring MAGA star was facing down a painfully small crowd at the signing of her book "MTG." Just before the trollish congresswoman was scheduled to arrive, a group of red-clad workers busied themselves with building big stacks of Greene's hardcover, published in November 2023. But only a few American flag-festooned folks had lined up. An hour later, Greene still hadn't arrived, but the crowd hadn't gotten much bigger, with fewer than 20 people waiting. When she finally rolled in at 3 PM, Greene took one look at the underwhelming crowd, muttered something to her entourage and then quickly hid in a nearby room.

Some people were milling around, but they were mostly journalists and photographers. After all, Greene is still an attraction for mainstream and liberal media outlets, whose readers enjoy hating her. The weak turnout of actual conservative consumers, however, suggests Greene's purported fan base has cooled its ardor.

Eventually, some attendees did swing by, curious about what had drawn the press. This added enough people to pull Greene out of hiding. Still, as we left, we spied a volunteer in a red shirt, offering people free copies as bait to draw them to Greene's table. It's possible, of course, that Greene has personally worn out her welcome with the MAGA crowd. Her trolling isn't triggering the liberals like it used to. Her alliance with the ousted House speaker Kevin McCarthy of California tarnished her MAGA credentials. While sales figures for her book aren't public, Greene's mandatory financial disclosures as a member of Congress suggest copies sit dusty on bookstore shelves. She did have a speaking role on the main stage at the RNC, but they shunted her to Monday night, the holding dock for the figures the party least wished to highlight.

After four days at the RNC, I suspect a major source of her woes was something darker. The GOP, already the party of sexism, is getting more gratuitous with its toxic masculinity. Everywhere one looked at the convention, Republicans were exalting maleness with an ardor that reads as "defensive" to outsiders but appears to be a convincing display to those inside the MAGA cult. The overcompensation led to a grand finale featuring both pro wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, rather than the traditional activists and politicians one hears at a convention. Hogan declared Trump a "gladiator," which should be funny applied to a doughy senior citizen caked in make-up, but appears to have been taken at face value by the RNC crowd. Along with the James Brown song, Trump used "Macho Man" by the Village People as intro music, still indifferent to the irony of the song.

The boys club vibe spread throughout the convention. Women were welcome, but only as support staff. A few years ago, female provocateurs like Greene were riding high, feeling like they could troll their way into MAGA stardom like their male counterparts. The message being sent at the GOP's 2024 convention: It's time for the gals to take a back seat.

Kari Lake, the current GOP senate candidate for Arizona and failed gubernatorial candidate, did not have a good convention. Her speech was early in the evening on Tuesday, and poorly attended. Lake, a former newscaster, is not getting the juice she seemed to think would be hers if she rebranded as a MAGA loudmouth. She did her best, dropping the Sarah Palin-associated phrase "mama bear" liberally throughout her speech. She even tried to rile up the crowd by yelling "fake news" at the media section. The two-minute hate fell flat. There were only a handful of reporters even sitting in the press section. Even Fox News declined to air her speech.

On Thursday, Lake had her book signing next to ones held by Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump aide Peter Navarro, recently released from prison. The two men were greeted like rock stars, with attendees happily waiting over an hour to meet their MAGA heroes. A few people did buy books from Lake, but her paltry line stood out even more next to those of her male counterparts....>

<....Plenty of female speakers had a better reception, but only when they were playing the role of cheerleader for the real MAGA leaders: men. Kellyanne Conway, who once seemed to believe being a Trump spokeswoman was a launching pad for herself, was a sad sight. She praised Trump's history of "promoting" women to a crowd that could not care less. The message had an unintended irony. Conway once enjoyed a reputation on Capitol Hill as a trusted political consultant. But the way she beclowned herself as Trump's spokesperson — remember "alternative facts?" — has rendered her a joke, even to Trump's loyal supporters.

"The Republican convention is just making it totally explicit that the project of Trumpism is centrally about masculinity,” Jackson Katz, who researches the tropes of masculinity, told 19th News. As Mel Leonor Barclay writes, it's "key to a Trump victory," because "Trump has a significant advantage among men — 27 points in a New York Times/Siena College survey of registered voters — that surpasses Biden’s advantage among women."

The crowd at the RNC certainly reflected this. While attendance was far lower than in the past — 27,000 people came this year, compared to the reported 45,000 in 2016. The convention also appeared to have more young people than eight years ago. But it was mostly young men, not women. Everywhere one looked at the Milwaukee RNC, packs of men in their 20s and 30s roamed around, often in tailored suits instead of the khakis and polo shirts preferred by their older brethren. But the dandified fashion of the young would-be fascist should not fool anyone. The key to attracting all these young men is a deeply misogynist message: Feminists deprived them of their "right" to dominate, and only through Trump can they regain the glorious patriarchal past.

The ironic result is that the avowedly anti-feminist would-be female leaders of the GOP now go ignored. Concerned Women for America has long been a Republican powerhouse, central to organizing the Christian right. But no matter how loud their microphones were, they couldn't attract attendees for public prayer sessions. The only people watching as the "concerned women" prayed were journalists.

Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect recently wrote about the research showing that the vibe isn't just try-hard. Hard evidence shows this chest-beating MAGA display is driven by what he deems "precarious manhood." I simply call it "insecurity." Citing a 2020 study by psychology researchers that found a correlation between Google searches for "erectile dysfunction, penis size, penis enlargement, hair loss, hair plugs, testosterone, and Viagra" and voting Republican, Meyerson writes that precarious manhood turns some men into "putty for a demagogue who blames your plight on MAGA’s usual suspects." However the young men in expensive suits talking about how they want a "tradwife" are not motivated by economic anxiety, as Meyerson assumes. Still he's not wrong that everything from Hogan ripping off his shirt to Trump pretending he's a general egging on troops is a collective overcompensation by a whole lot of men.

In this mass psychodrama, there isn't a place for female leaders.

For a few minutes during the Trump administration, there did seem to be a path to power for women like Greene or Lake or their Colorado counterpart, Rep. Lauren Boebert. Most of the early enthusiasm appears due to the novelty of seeing right-wing women who could hold their own in the competition to be the loudest bully in the room. Such women were especially good at triggering liberals, who may not be as misogynist as Republicans but still have sexist expectations that it's especially unbecoming for women to act this way. But in the past year or so, dating at least back to when Boebert got caught groping her date at "Beetlejuice: The Musical," the shine has come off. Liberals no longer react to female MAGA's provocations with outrage, but with eye-rolling. Without the trigger-the-liberals effect, it appears lady trolls have little to offer the Republican base. They certainly aren't valued as leaders in a party where men live in a constant state of paranoia about being emasculated.>

<Elon Musk’s continued gripes with California, where more than one in five new cars sold are electric, is losing him customers to Rivian.

Industry data on Thursday revealed demand for new Teslas in the Golden State plummeted 24% to 52,211 vehicles in Q2, based on registrations recorded post-sale when a vehicle’s title is processed.

The latest figures mark Tesla’s third consecutive three-month period of declines compared to the previous year, suggesting that the volume of its existing range may have peaked in 2023 when it hit 230,500 vehicles.

“Tesla’s allure seems to be wearing off,” said the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA), which published the figures it sources from Experian Automotive.

Meanwhile, registrations of its Rivian soared 69% this quarter to 3,742 vehicles, making it the fastest-growing major brand in California.

The Rivian R1S crossover has climbed one spot to become the third best-selling non-Tesla EV behind only the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Ford Mustang Mach-E.

One well-known Tesla owner from Malibu who frequently uploads videos of Full-Self Driving beta tests to social media under her avatar @MissJilliane, posted on Tuesday after Musk publicly endorsed Trump that she, too, was thinking of ditching her Tesla for a Rivian.

California is crucial for Tesla’s business since the EV share of the state's new car market at 21.4% is nearly three times the U.S. average of 7.5% in 2023.

Of the nearly 381,000 electric vehicles sold in the state that year across all car brands, six out of ten were Tesla cars.

Even when conventional combustion vehicles are included in the mix, the Model 3 was California’s best-selling passenger car in 2023, surpassing the Toyota Camry, while the Model Y proved the state’s most popular vehicle of any kind.

The brand even briefly eclipsed Toyota as the number one choice for buyers in the state when Tesla sales nearly hit 69,000 cars in the second quarter of last year.

To be clear, Tesla still dominates the state’s EV market with a 53% market share in the first half of 2024.

That means all other competitors combined still sell fewer EVs than Musk.

Rivian had a share of just 3.6%, by comparison.

Yet that also means California is Tesla’s market to lose, and Musk does not appear to be doing his company any favors by constantly agitating against left-leaning issues popular among many of his mainly progressive customers.

After formally endorsing Trump on Sunday, the entrepreneur then followed up with news on Tuesday he was moving the headquarters of both SpaceX and X Corp to Texas.

He cited a controversial new state law called AB1955 that prohibits teachers from discussing children’s sexual identity with their parents—for Musk “the final straw”.

He had already voiced his displeasure with Sacramento when he moved the headquarters of Tesla three years ago during the pandemic.

The demanding CEO had repeatedly clashed with county health officials over the operation of his Fremont vehicle factory, the largest in North America, which produced some 560,00 cars last year.

Musk has won over many new conservative converts to his social media business, which rebranded last year to eliminate any association it still had with legacy Twitter.

But this doesn’t help him when it comes to Tesla, since the new cohort he recruited to boost advertising-relevant traffic on his X platform typically takes a very dim view of the environmentally friendly EVs predominantly preferred by voters on the left.>

Suck your hero's dick in public, pay on the balance sheet.

<....How To Adjust Your Privacy Settings On Venmo

To make your Venmo more private, you will want to toggle off the app’s default settings that make your account details visible to strangers.

Venmo makes your friends list public by default, and the Wired article might’ve never been written if Vance had simply changed his settings.

Here’s how to avoid a fate like his:

1. Open your Venmo app, go to Settings, select Privacy and then Friends List.

2. Select the “Private” option, so your friends list is visible only to you.

3. Toggle off the setting that reads “Appear in other users’ friends lists,” so your connections are kept more private.

Your transactions ― including payment comments, names of senders and recipients, and payment time stamps ― are public unless you manually choose otherwise.

Venmo wants transactions to be public as part of the platform’s social strategy. “We make it default because it’s fun to share [information] with friends in the social world,” a company representative told CNET in 2018.

But keeping this information public is not smart for campaigning politicians, nor is it smart for anyone who wants to maintain some privacy around their utility bills, donations or therapy sessions.

Here how to make your transactions private:

1. Go to Settings, select Privacy, and then choose the “Private” option.

2. If your accounts details were once public and you want to hide past transactions, select Past Transactions, and then choose “Change All to Private.”

Beyond changing your privacy settings, you should also be adding more authentication layers to your account so it becomes harder for a stranger to get in.

1. Go to Settings, and then select Face ID & PIN.

2. Turn on “Enable Face ID & Pin.”

This is not the first time that a public official has had their app activity revealed. In 2021, BuzzFeed News (the now-shuttered outlet owned by BuzzFeed, HuffPost’s parent company) found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account in less than 10 minutes.

In fact, this might not even be the only privacy exposure for Vance, as Slate may have found his Spotify profile this week too.

Ultimately, it’s good to always double-check the privacy settings on your accounts, because all too often the default settings make your information public for the entire world to see.>

<Before you ever have a chance to get judged by a human hiring manager, your résumé may be screened out by a machine.

Applicant tracking systems, which are used to manage, sort and filter electronic job submissions, are popular with employers who handle large volumes of applicants. A 2018 analysis of job listings from online résumé service Jobscan found that 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies were using such a system.

If you apply online for employment and the URL of the job listing includes names like Taleo, Workday, SuccessFactors, iCIMS, BrassRing or ADP, you are applying through an applicant tracking system.

Like all human-run systems, these programs are not perfect. In a 2016 survey of 374 human resources professionals, 62 percent admitted that some qualified candidates are likely being filtered out by their software.

Sometimes these errors are not predictable ― at least not to the job applicant. Patrick Foss of ThinkTalent Human Capital Partners, who advises clients on applicant tracking systems and other talent technologies, pointed to one such example: when the person setting the parameters for a job sets the filter to require a bachelor’s degree, but fails to mark any degree above that which would also be acceptable.

But you can prepare for other kinds of hiccups with applicant tracking systems. Here are three key ways to format your résumé so that the tracking program won’t reject you for no good reason.

1. Don’t put information in the header and footer.

Putting your contact information in the header or footer of your résumé may seem like an eye-catching way to grab a recruiter’s attention, but it is also a bad idea when facing an applicant tracking system, according to the experts.

“That is so dangerous,” said Gala Jackson, a certified career and executive leadership coach. “Putting information in the header or footer of your document actually can cause some errors in applicant tracking systems. If you’ve ever gotten one of those immediate ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ emails, it’s probably something to do with the formatting.”

The problem is that software may not read information correctly or at all if it appears in those top and bottom margins.

“Put your name and address at the top of the page right below where the header would fall, because otherwise you will never be able to get contacted because the software can’t read it,” said Virginia Franco, a nationally certified résumé writer.

“Résumé parsers are looking for fielded information,” Foss said. “It shouldn’t matter, but if you’re putting it in the header or footer, it may not pick that up accurately.”

2. Don’t get creative with columns and graphics.

There are many creative résumé templates out there. But Ashley Watkins, a nationally certified résumé writer, warned that graphics, tables and excessive columns can be hard for an applicant tracking system to parse.

“That graphic is only for the human reader,” she said. “You can do that if you know that your résumé is being delivered directly to a person.”

Watkins suggested one trick that job applicants can try to ensure their résumé is software-friendly: Save it as a .txt unformatted document and then look at it.

“If they can read it in that and all the information is there, nothing is deleted, then your résumé more than likely can be read by the [applicant tracking system],” she said....>

<....3. Align your résumé keywords with the job description.

Read through the job description and make sure the keywords used for the activities, titles and tools associated with the position are reflected in your own résumé, said Alison Daley, the founder of a tech recruitment training platform called Recruiting Innovation.

Do not despair if your professional background is not the absolute ideal for that job.

“If they call the role a UX designer and you don’t have a UX designer title yet, then what you could do [is] focus on the other keywords in terms of your experience,” Daley said.

Or if you lack the bachelor’s degree noted in the job listing, you can still help your chances by putting down your relevant coursework, experts advise.

How you format your employment history is also key, Franco said. The applicant tracking software may not make certain leaps that are obvious to the human mind. So if you held multiple roles with a single employer, Franco advised listing that company with each role. Otherwise, she said, “you run the risk that it can’t score it as associated with that company.”

Making your résumé easy to understand for an applicant tracking system is one small step to making the process of finding a job run a little smoother.

Of course, another way to avoid the hassles of applicant tracking systems is to get your résumé directly in the hands of a hiring manager. Knowing someone at the company can get you ahead of the pack, as referred candidates are twice as likely to be hired as other candidates applying through job boards, a 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found.

“My biggest advice for all of this is try and bypass screening whenever possible,” Franco said. Look to your networks and reach out directly. “And then it doesn’t matter if you score amazing or horrible, because you’ve got someone who is willing to pick you out of the pile and get it in front of the right people.”>

<President Biden's initiative to establish Supreme Court term limits and an enforceable ethics code could help restore much needed public trust in the court. Just as importantly, it’s a reminder that we need not surrender to a court that has aggrandized itself at every turn.

The president’s proposals will require congressional approval, and that in turn highlights the role every American can play in reining in a court that has tilted into ideological activism: The key is what we do on Nov. 5. You were probably taught that the justices have the final say on our laws, but in reality that power belongs to voters.

To start, there is no question that the court would be better off with term-limited justices who can no longer play politics with the timing of their retirements, and with an ethics code that has teeth and could eliminate even the appearance of impropriety in the justices’ behavior.

But the president should be asking for more — congressional action that responds specifically to the alarming decisions issued by the court’s current conservative supermajority.

Its most dangerous ruling, delivered on July 2, was its holding that Donald Trump enjoys “presumptive” immunity from criminal prosecution based on his “official acts.” The upshot is that the court, not a jury of ordinary Americans, will likely get to make the final call on Trump’s accountability for his 2020 election falsehoods and schemes.

In another sweeping decision, the court set aside four decades of precedent and arrogated power long held by federal agencies. Instead of deferring to, say, the Environmental Protection Agency on the technical how-tos of applying laws like the Clean Water Act, the court claimed that it should have the final say — expertise and democratic accountability be damned.

The court similarly substituted its judgment for the otherwise apparent meaning of federal statutes by upending what constitutes a “machine gun” and obstruction of official proceedings. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her dissent from the latter ruling, the majority had to do “textual backflips to find some way — any way” — to get to its preferred outcome. In doing so, it blocked a crucial gun safety measure and narrowed the basis for charging those involved with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.

Fortunately, as supreme as the Supreme Court is, it doesn’t have to be the final word on these cases. The court gets to interpret the law, but we voters, through our representatives, decide what that law is.

For those who object to the current court’s power grab, that means showing up at the polls this year and voting for a Democratic majority in Congress, despite reasonable, good-faith disagreements with President Biden and his party. Those concerns will matter little if an unaccountable Supreme Court continues to aggrandize itself at the people’s expense.

Here’s how a Democratic majority could push back.

In the presidential immunity case, one worry is that even if lower courts deem much of Trump’s Jan. 6 conduct to have been unofficial, and thus subject to prosecution, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices will simply band together to reverse that determination.

And yet Article III of the Constitution allows Congress to make “exceptions” from the Supreme Court’s power to hear appeals. A reestablished Democratic House majority could pass a law declaring the lower court’s ruling final, and a Democratic majority in the Senate could do the same by voting for a one-time suspension of the filibuster, just as the Republican majority did when it confirmed Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

As for the court’s takeover of deference to federal agencies, a Democratic majority in Congress could amend the Administrative Procedure Act to unambiguously grant agency experts the benefit of the doubt on reasonable regulations. Likewise, a Democratic Congress could enact legislation to override the court’s aberrant interpretations of laws regulating machine guns and defining the obstruction of official proceedings.

If voters in November keep the court in mind as they mark their ballots, they can not only undo this term’s most harmful decisions, but also send a forceful message to the power-hungry justices: The highest court in the land can either have the final word on the hard cases that divide us, or it can lurch the law far to the right. But it can’t do both.>

<When it comes to abortion, Republicans are doing nothing less than gaslighting America.

Well aware that the divisive issue could be their Achilles' heel in November, the GOP is pretending to soften its opposition to abortion rights.

Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance scrubbed his website of absolutist antiabortion rhetoric during last week's Republican National Convention. On Monday, the day former President Trump named Vance as his running mate, Vance’s Senate campaign website espoused “the sanctity of all life” and called for “eliminating abortion.” By Tuesday afternoon, the language was gone, according to HuffPost, and then the website itself disappeared as it redirected users to Trump’s website.

“My view is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his views on abortion are going to be the views that dominate this party and drive this party forward,” Vance told Fox News on Monday. “You have to believe in reasonable exceptions because that’s where the American people are.”

But that’s not where the American people are. The American people overwhelmingly believe abortion should be legal in almost all cases, not just in “reasonable exceptions.” It is a minority — the loud Christian right to which Trump owes his takeover of the Republican Party — that does not want women to have abortions ever, full stop.

Hence the gaslighting.

It began after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. That year's midterm elections soon gave Republicans a rude awakening to the public's opinion of the decision, which ended half a century of federal reproductive rights. Polls had identified inflation as voters' biggest concern, but abortion ended up looming like a dark cloud over Republican candidates.

Young women and women over 65 broke hard for Democrats, who gave up only a small fraction of House seats they were expected to lose as the incumbent party. Nearly half of voters and nearly two-thirds of Democrats said the court’s abortion decision, in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization, had a major impact on their choices. Dobbs, one Democratic strategist told NPR, “made this argument of Republican extremism more real to voters. It connected the dots.”

And now, in an effort to win over suburban women, the Republican Party is scrambling to disconnect those dots.

A Wall Street Journal poll last spring found that while Trump narrowly led President Biden in six of seven battleground states, 39% of suburban women said abortion was a make-or-break issue for them, more important than any other. A majority said they considered Trump’s abortion stance too restrictive.

So how can Trump allay the fears of these voters? As he always does: by making stuff up.

First, he is claiming he never supported a federal ban on abortion, which is, of course, a blatant lie. As president, he supported a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy; he later said he was open to one after 15 weeks. And he even told Chris Matthews in 2016 that women who seek abortions should face “some form of punishment.”

And of course, he has spent the last two years crowing about his Supreme Court nominees, all three of whom voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Brett M. Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett engaged in their own gaslighting when they misled the Senate about their views on the issue during their confirmation hearings. All said they respected stare decisis, the principle that justices should be guided by the decisions made by previous courts, such as Roe and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which reaffirmed and refined the rights set out in Roe....>

<....Trump officially retreated from his earlier positions in April, saying in a video posted on his Truth Social platform, “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land — in this case, the law of the state.”

But in June, in a recorded video message for the Danbury Institute, a coalition of Christian nationalists that has described abortion as “child sacrifice,” Trump seemed to signal that he agreed. “I’ll be with you side by side,” he promised. “You’re gonna make a comeback like just about no other group.”

Capitulating to Trump’s political calculation, the GOP platform has been watered down on abortion for the first time in decades. Since 1984, the platform has embraced a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Now the platform says states should be free to determine their own laws on the subject and that the party will support policies that “advance Prenatal care, access to Birth Control and IVF," or fertility treatments.

It's no wonder given that voters have supported reproductive rights in all seven of the states that have had abortion on the ballot since Dobbs. Voters in 11 more states will have the chance this fall to keep abortion legal or to enshrine it as a constitutional right.

Republicans all over this country are ripping away the agency of American women while pretending otherwise. Come November, women and all those who support us have a fighting chance to get it back.>

<Sometime around 1970, the American personality changed. In prior decades, people tended to define themselves according to the social roles they played: I’m a farmer, teacher, housewife, priest. But then a more individualistic culture took over. The University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Veroff and his colleagues compared national surveys conducted in 1957 and 1976 and found a significant shift in people’s self-definition: A communal, “socially integrated” mindset was being replaced with a “personal or individuated” mindset. The right-wing version of this individualism (which emphasized economic freedom) and the left-wing version (which emphasized lifestyle freedom) were different, but it was individual freedom all the way down. This culture of expressive individualism hit a kind of apotheosis with a 1997 cover story in Fast Company headlined “The Brand Called You,” in which Tom Peters, the leading management guru of the day, declared that “we are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.”

But cultural change tends to have a pendulum-style rhythm, and we are now at the dawn of another collective phase. Unfortunately, this new culture of communalism has got some big problems.

Twenty-first-century communalism is a peculiar kind of communalism. For starters, it’s very socially conscious and political. Whether you’re on the MAGA right or the social-justice left, you define your identity by how you stand against what you perceive to be the dominant structures of society. Groups on each side of the political divide are held together less by common affections than by a common sense of threat, an experience of collective oppression. Today’s communal culture is based on a shared belief that society is broken, systems are rotten, the game is rigged, injustice prevails, the venal elites are out to get us; we find solidarity and meaning in resisting their oppression together. Again, there is a right-wing version (Donald Trump’s “I am your retribution”) and a left-wing version (the intersectional community of oppressed groups), but what they share is an us-versus-them Manichaeism. The culture war gives life shape and meaning.

Social scientists have had to come up with new phrases to capture this set of cultural attitudes and practices. In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified “vindictive protectiveness,” which is what happens when an online mob rallies together to punish a perceived threat from an oppressor. Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen developed the concept of “hostile solidarity” to describe the ways that retaliatory action binds people against their foes. This mode of collectivism embeds us in communities—but they’re not friendly communities; they’re angry ones.

In this culture, people feel bonded not because they are cooperating with one another but because they are indignant about the same things. Consider the word woke, which has been so politicized, and has been used in so many sloppy ways, that it has outlived its usefulness. But when it entered the mainstream—sometime between 2008 and 2013—it suggested that you could enter the circle of the enlightened, the inner ring of social belonging, simply by adopting a mode of awareness. To be woke was to perceive the world in a certain way, to understand how terrible everything is. You established solidarity by demonstrating that you were enlightened enough to see the pervasive rottenness of things.

In this way, pessimism becomes a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you’re naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.

This culture has produced a succession of prophets of doom across the ideological spectrum, people who established their moral courage by portraying the situation as negatively as possible. In 2016, the conservative speechwriter Michael Anton unified the Trumpian right with his “The Flight 93 Election” essay, which argued that desperate measures must be taken to keep America from crashing to its ruin. Trump followed up with his “American carnage” inaugural address, depicting the country as a chaotic dystopia. Quotidian catastrophizing has become a staple of Republican discourse. Here, for example, is a transcript of a video that a U.S. representative sent out to his supporters last July 4:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people who are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they are coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God Bless America.

<....But a pessimism just as pervasive reigns on the left. The upbeat ethos of Barack Obama and Lin-Manuel Miranda—in which racial progress was seen as slow but steady—gave way to the intractable pessimism of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the critical race theorists. Extreme pessimism is now the go-to conversational stance. This tweet from The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz captures the vibe: “People are like ‘why are kids so depressed? It must be their PHONES!’ But never mention that fact that we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic [with] record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”

This deep sense of pessimism has become more and more predominant, especially among the young. Since about 2004, the share of American 12th graders who say it is “hard to have hope for the world” has been surging, according to surveys by Monitoring the Future, which has tracked the attitudes of high schoolers since 1975. There’s also been a rise in 12th graders who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” Since 2012, the share of 12th graders who expect to get a graduate degree or a professional job has plummeted.

The prevailing culture nurtures these attitudes. But there is a giant gap between many of these negative perceptions and actual reality. For example, since the mid-1970s the number of women who have earned college degrees and graduate degrees, and taken leadership positions in society, has risen dramatically; women’s wages are also much higher than in previous generations. Yet, as the psychologist Jean Twenge shows in her book Generations, teenage girls today are more likely than teenage girls in the ’70s to believe that women are discriminated against. Surely that’s partly because successive waves of feminism have raised women’s awareness of ongoing discrimination. But women are doing meaningfully better by these measures, and yet young women are feeling worse.

Many years ago, I auditioned to be a co-host of the CNN show Crossfire. Before the audition, one of the producers pulled me aside and told me that the key to the show was not what you say. No, the key to the show, I was told, was that you must wear a look of indignant rage as the other person is talking. That look of contemptuous fury, which the cameras featured in close-up shots, was what powered the show and kept viewers hooked. In the decades since, Tucker Carlson, who was a Crossfire co-host, has ridden that look—mouth pursed, eyes narrowed, eyebrows furrowed—to fame and fortune. With a single expression, he communicates that “they” are screwing the country and that “we” need to be outraged. Tucker happens to be on the right, but millions of people on both the left and the right now look at the world through a distorting lens like his.

The current culture confers status and belonging to those who see the world as negatively as possible. Once people learned this, they were going to perceive the world as a Hunger Games–like hellscape.

This negativity saturates everything. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson noted recently, more than 5,500 podcasts now have the word trauma in their title. Political life is seen through a negative valence. A YouGov survey of 33,000 Americans found that both sides of the political debate believe they are losing. Liberals think the country is moving right; conservatives are convinced that the country is moving left. Whatever your perspective, everything appears to be going downhill.

Even institutions as wholesome as motherhood have come to be seen as horrific. In December, Vox ran an essay titled “How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood.” A couple of weeks before that, The New Yorker published “The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World.” In previous eras, people were enculturated to see parenthood as a challenging but deeply rewarding and love-drenched experience. Now motherhood is regarded as a postapocalyptic @#$% show. Recently published books on motherhood include Mom Rage, Screaming on the Inside, and All the Rage.....>

<....In a culture where negativity is aligned with righteousness, anything good can be seen as a mark of ill-gotten privilege. And if by chance one does experience pleasure, don’t be so insensitive as to admit it in public, because that will reveal you are not allying properly with the oppressed: “When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers,” Rachel Cohen wrote in that Vox essay, “I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly. Doing so could seem insensitive to those whose experiences were not as positive, or those in more frustrating relationships. Some also worried that betraying too much enthusiasm for child-rearing could ossify essentialist tropes or detract from larger feminist goals.” Publicly admitting that you love and enjoy motherhood has come to be seen as a betrayal of feminism.

The culture of collective negativity has had a deleterious effect on levels of trust: In 1964, 45 percent of Americans said that most people can be trusted, according to a survey by American National Election Studies. That survey no longer asks this question, but a University of Chicago survey asked the exact same question to Americans in 2022 and found that number is now 25 percent. Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that, most of the time, people just look out for themselves, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Seventy-one percent say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.”

Human relationships have come to be viewed through a prism of power and exploitation. Institutions are assumed to be fundamentally illegitimate, rigged. A friend who teaches at Stanford recently told me that many of his students would not assume he had gone into teaching to serve his students, or to seek their good; rather, they see him as a cog in the corrupt system holding them down. Recently, I was struck by a sentence in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article about how the economist Raj Chetty runs his research lab at Harvard. Chetty is the most important social scientist in America right now, because of his revelatory work on the relationship between income inequality and life opportunity. You might reasonably see getting to work in his lab as a tremendous honor, a great educational experience, and a professional launchpad. But that’s not how several of his assistants saw it. “After landing the fellowship,” The Chronicle reported, “some employees said they were also disturbed to find a culture of overwork that left them fried but feeling forced to impress in order to secure a letter of recommendation to a top Ph.D. program.” If you see the system as legitimate, you will likely see the chance to work hard for a transformative scholar as an opportunity to achieve great things as part of a great team. If you see the system as illegitimate, that hard work is just a form of exploitation that will leave you “fried.” If you see the system as legitimate, impressing mentors is a chance to earn the esteem of those whose esteem is worth having. If you see the system as illegitimate, the whole letters-of-recommendation business is a rigged game that allows the dominant to preserve their status.

Our most recent previous period of apocalyptic collectivism was the McCarthy era. During that time, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noticed that his fellow anti-communists were constantly demanding “that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor.” It wasn’t enough to disapprove of communism; one had to engage in collective moments of group hate. Meanwhile, on the left, intellectuals warned of a looming age of American fascism. This mode of escalating indignation led to what Niebuhr called “apoplectic rigidity,” an inability to see the world as it is, but rather only those nightmarish elements that justify the hatred and rage that is the source of your self-worth.

<....Is this because the economy is particularly bad for young people? That’s not what the data reveal. As Twenge has pointed out, the median Millennial household earns considerably more, adjusted for inflation, than median households of the Silent Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X earned at the comparable moment in their lives; they earn $9,000 more a year than Gen X households, and $10,000 more than Boomer households did at the same age. Household incomes for young adults are at historic highs, while homeownership rates for young adults are comparable to previous generations’. All of which suggests that difference in the generational experiences is not economic; it’s psychological.

I can see why, in a lonely world, people would embrace the community that collective negativity offers. As the New York Times columnist David French has noted, Trump rallies are filled with rage, but they are also characterized by a festive atmosphere, a sense of mutual belonging; immigrants might be poisoning America’s blood, but we’re having fun singing “Y.M.C.A.” together.

Being negative also helps you appear smart. In a classic 1983 study by the psychologist Teresa Amabile, authors of scathingly negative book reviews were perceived as more intelligent than the authors of positive reviews. Intellectually insecure people tend to be negative because they think it displays their brain power.

Believing in vicious conspiracy theories can also boost your self-esteem: You are the superior mind who sees beneath the surface into the hidden realms where evil cabals really run the world. You have true knowledge of how the world works, which the masses are too naive to see. Conspiracy theories put you in the role of the truth-telling hero. Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.

The problem is that if you mess around with negative emotions, negative emotions will mess around with you, eventually taking over your life. Focusing on the negative inflates negativity. As John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister note in their book The Power of Bad, if you interpret the world through the lens of collective trauma, you may become overwhelmed by self-perpetuating waves of fear, anger, and hate. You’re likely to fall into a neurotic spiral, in which you become more likely to perceive events as negative, which makes you feel terrible, which makes you more alert to threats, which makes you perceive even more negative events, and on and on. Moreover, negativity is extremely contagious. When people around us are pessimistic, indignant, and rageful, we’re soon likely to become that way too. This is how today’s culture has produced mass neuroticism.

The neuroticism problem seems to be especially acute on the left. Over the past decade or so, depression rates have been rising for all young adults, but they have not been hitting all groups equally, according to a 2022 study by psychiatric epidemiologists. Liberal young women experienced the highest increase in depression levels. Liberal young women are also the most likely to be depressed, followed by liberal young men, conservative young women, and, the least depressed, conservative young men. Why should this be?

In the substantial literature on how happiness intersects with ideology, one of the most robust findings is that conservatives are happier than progressives. That’s long been explained by the fact that conservatives are more likely to be married and to attend church, two activities that correlate with higher happiness levels. (Also, it could be that true conservatives, by definition, are more content with the status quo.)

<....“Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life” are “vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt and a sense that life simply happens to them,” the journalist Jill Filipovic wrote recently on Substack. And yet victimization, pain, and powerlessness are now the approved postures of our time.

I am not saying that America doesn’t have real problems—Trump, climate change, racial injustice, persistent income inequality, a rising tide of authoritarianism around the globe. In our age, as in every age, there are things to protest and things to be grateful for.

What I am saying is that the persistent gaps between how things are and how they are perceived are new, maybe even unprecedented. In case after case, the data show one thing; conventional wisdom perceives another. President Joe Biden leads an economy that is producing millions of jobs and raising real wages, but his poll numbers about his economic stewardship are terrible. He passes legislation that invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy, but the people most agitated about climate change give him no credit. Biden’s curse is that he is running not just against the Republicans but against the entire zeitgeist.

We have produced a culture that celebrates catastrophizing. This does not lend itself to effective strategies for achieving social change. The prevailing assumption seems to be that the more bitterly people denounce a situation, the more they will be motivated to change it. But history shows the exact opposite to be true. As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman demonstrated in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, social reform tends to happen in moments of growth and prosperity. It happens when people are feeling secure and are inspired to share their good fortune. It happens when leaders can convey a plausible vision of the common good.

A recent paper by four economists reinforces the idea that the mood of a culture can directly effect material progress. The researchers analyzed 173,031 works published from 1500 to 1900, and discovered that words relating to progress proliferated starting in the 1600s. The researchers infer that the “cultural evolution” this evinced over the coming centuries helped give rise to the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant economic benefits. John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist for the Financial Times, recently extended this analysis to the present day using Google Ngram and found that “the frequency of terms related to progress, improvement, and the future has dropped by about 25 percent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common.” That economic growth has slowed during this period is probably not coincidence, Burn-Murdoch notes. Doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The thought of a second Trump term appalls and terrifies me. But to the more apocalyptic and Chicken Little–ish of my progressive friends, I’ll say this: You’re only helping him. Donald Trump thrives in an atmosphere of menace. Authoritarianism flourishes amid pessimism, fear, and rage. Trump feeds off zero-sum thinking, the notion that society is war—us-versus-them, dog-eat-dog. The more you contribute to the culture of depressive negativity, the more likely Trump’s reelection becomes.

The old late-20th-century culture of rampant individualism had to go. It liberated individuals but frayed the bonds that formerly united people. Somehow, our new communal culture needs to replace bonds of negative polarization and collective victimization with bonds of common loves and collective action.

One moment in history gives me hope. In the 1950s, as I’ve noted, the McCarthy era brought a wave of paranoia about communists under every bed. But that moment generated a cultural recoil that eventually led to, for instance, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, one of the most lavishly optimistic addresses in American history: “Together, let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate diseases, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.” And it wasn’t so long ago that Barack Obama thrilled millions with his gospel of hope and change. We shouldn’t let our current season of gloom and menace become self-fulfilling, but rather should help make the country ripe for a communalism of belonging. History shows that it doesn’t pay to be pessimistic about pessimism.>

<Donald Trump lashed out Sunday at President Biden after the incumbent said he was ending his campaign, as his advisers mapped out a new strategy to adapt to a decision that upended the race less than four months before the election.

The Republican nominee, whose campaign had hoped Biden would stay in the contest, wrote on his social media website that Biden was “never” fit to serve or run for reelection and vowed to “remedy the damage he has done very quickly.” In private, his aides were advancing preparations to run against Vice President Harris, anticipating that their main argument against her would focus on her role in Biden’s border policy, according to people familiar with the situation, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.

Aides to the former president had hoped that Biden would stay in because they viewed him as easiest to beat, but they began preparing for other possibilities well before Biden left the race and have ramped up their attacks on Harris. Privately, Trump allies have worried that a Democrat besides Biden or Harris could be a tougher opponent.

Multiple Trump advisers said the main argument against Harris will be her role addressing the root causes of migration to the U.S. — which Republicans have used to brand her the “border czar” — and what has happened at the southern border under her watch.

Trump posted his reaction on Truth Social, his social media site, about 45 minutes after Biden shared a letter announcing his withdrawal.

“Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve — And never was!” Trump wrote. “He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement.” He added, “We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.”

Biden ended his campaign after weeks of growing pressure to do so from fellow Democrats after a widely criticized debate performance in which he repeatedly appeared to lose his train of thought.

Other Republican leaders started coalescing behind a clear message: If Biden couldn’t run for reelection, then he should not continue serving as president. In a flood of statements, they accused Democrats of covering up Biden’s condition and said voters should remember it in November.

“Voters will neither forgive nor forget the ultimate betrayal of their trust,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson (R-N.C.). “Judgment day is coming in November, when Americans will hand down Democrats’ ultimate punishment: Donald Trump in the White House and a larger House Republican majority.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) echoed the Trump team’s suggestions that Democrats were acting undemocratically in pushing for Biden’s removal from the ticket.

“The party’s prospects are no better now with Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-owns the disastrous policy failures of the Biden Administration,” Johnson said in a statement, tying her to Biden’s border policies in particular.

At a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Saturday, Trump ridiculed Harris’s laugh, mispronounced her first name — which many Republicans routinely butcher — and called the vice president “crazy,” “nuts” and “crazy as Nancy Pelosi.”

Sen J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, attacked Harris as well, drawing loud boos when he mentioned her name.

“Kamala Harris said something to the effect that I have no loyalty to this country,” Vance said. “Well, I don’t know, Kamala. I did serve in the United States Marine Corps and built a business, what the hell have you done, other than collect a check?”>

<President Joe Biden, after weeks of pressure, has withdrawn from his re-election campaign. In recent days, questions have also been raised about the legal practicalities of Democrats replacing Biden with another candidate, most likely Vice President Kamala Harris. Some have expressed fears that Republicans might attempt to block a Biden replacement from appearing on ballots in November. This is one thing Democrats don’t have to worry about.

America’s ballot access laws, the procedures for how candidates are placed on the ballot in each state, are notoriously difficult compared to other democracies’ laws.

Experts such as Richard Winger, the longtime publisher of Ballot Access News and the nation’s foremost authority on the topic, have long decried the arbitrarily difficult petition thresholds and discriminatory treatment of third-party and independent candidates. Major-party candidates also run afoul of the rules on occasion. Just this year, former President Donald Trump’s ballot access was imperiled under the 14th Amendment’s bar on insurrectionists before the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. But one thing is clear: There is no credible basis for the claims that the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, whoever that may be, will be kicked off the ballot in any state. As things stand currently, no relevant deadlines have passed. The party remains perfectly free to choose its nominee however it wants, and to choose whomever it wants.

Much of the panic stems from claims by the Heritage Foundation (the same organization behind Project 2025) arguing that ambiguities in state election laws could provide an opportunity to challenge a Biden replacement. On the legal merits, these arguments are thin, bordering on specious. But more importantly, they are inapplicable for now. As it currently stands, state Democratic parties wouldn’t be replacing Biden at all, because he is not yet the party’s official nominee.

Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at Heritage, has claimed that “in many states, including in several key states, the deadline for getting on the ballot has already passed.” This is simply untrue, and media outlets should fact-check this assertion rather than taking it at face value.

Winger, for good reason, calls much of the coverage about this threat “gullible.” As he notes, “there would be no legal problem in any state.” UCLA professor Rick Hasen, another widely respected election law expert, has also observed “the bottom line is that there is unlikely to be an election law impediment to replacing Biden.”

First, it’s worth taking a step back to understand how the Democratic and Republican nominees for president and vice president come to appear on state ballots.

In every state, both major parties are qualified for what is known as “automatic” presidential ballot access. In other words, their nominees do not need to gather petition signatures or clear any other hurdles to secure a spot on the general election ballot. Instead, the qualified political parties simply tell the state’s election authorities (in most states, the secretary of state) who its candidates are. This process is never completed prior to the formal nomination by the party’s national convention.

With one potential caveat, no state currently requires major parties to certify their presidential ticket any earlier than Aug. 21. Biden is not filed to appear on the ballot in any state at the moment, because he has not yet been formally nominated.

The one complication arises in Ohio, which previously had an unusually early deadline of Aug. 7. At the insistence of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, the state Legislature passed a law to accommodate this year’s later Democratic National Convention, scheduled to begin on Aug. 19. Ohio’s new law sets the deadline as Sept. 1. However, the Democratic National Committee remains skittish, noting the contradiction that Ohio’s new law does not actually come into effect until Sept. 1. For this reason, the party had planned to conduct a virtual roll call of convention delegates to formalize the nomination sometime prior to Aug. 7.....>

<....Even with this wrinkle in Ohio, there is no potential problem. All of the state laws to which Heritage’s commenters have pointed only concern the process for the party to replace one of its candidates later in the calendar, after having previously certified the Biden-Harris ticket.

Another concern that has been raised is that the party could be open to litigation for disregarding the results of the primary elections. However, this misunderstands the role of state-run primary elections in the presidential nomination process. The Republican and Democratic parties are not required, and can not be required, to use the primaries at all. The primaries are, in effect, a nonbinding straw poll run by state governments. It is only through the party’s internal rules, as a private organization, that primaries are used to allocate convention delegates among the candidates seeking the nomination.

We have already seen both parties decide to ignore state primaries in this election. Democrats did so in New Hampshire, which held its primary too early and out of turn according to the party’s newly adopted schedule. Republicans did the same in Nevada, spurning the state’s primary election in favor of a caucus administered by the party. This presents no legal problem because political parties, in deciding whom to nominate and how, are engaged in their own freedom of speech and association, fully protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has firmly ruled state governments have no power to impose any requirements on how the party conventions function or whom they may choose to nominate.

With so much at stake in this year’s election, Democrats are understandably a bit panicked. There are a great many things to be worried about, with the unprecedented reality of an incumbent president dropping out of the race this late, amid serious concerns about his declining mental acuity and physical stamina. But with enough things on their plate to worry about, placing their party’s nominee on the ballot need not be one of them.>

<In my column Prelude to Armageddon, I dwelt on the abundance of Jewish chess masters from the second half of the 19th century, which continued well into the 20th century. Famous names proliferate, imbued with the rich cultural heritage of the Central European Jewish environment. Their names include: Johannes Zukertort, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, Siegbert Tarrasch, Jacques Mieses, Akiba Rubinstein, Aron Nimzowitsch and the prime topic of this week’s column, Rudolf Spielmann.

The last six of these played chess actively well into the 1930s — a time when the German language, not to mention German politics, was entering an intense period of flux. For example, foreign words, so-called “Fremdwörter”, were phased out by the Nazis. Thus “Telefon” (telephone) was replaced by “Fernsprecher”, and the easily comprehensible “Kandidatenturnier”, or qualification tournament, gave way to the more clumsy, if purely Teutonic, “Anwärtertreffen”.

As words began to translate into actions, the German chess writer and official Max Blümich was entrusted by the Nazis with revising the celebrated chess primer, Kleines Lehrbuch des Schachs. This concise chess manual had been co-authored by the aforementioned Jacques Mieses: an ingenious but erratic player, yet a most lucid and reliable author, whose writings had nurtured generations of pre-Nazi German chess enthusiasts. Irritatingly for the Gauleiters of grammar, spelling and the written word in general, Mieses was Jewish.

Blümich’s solution was brutal. He simply eliminated the original author’s name from the book, and for good measure, in the editions of 1941 and 1943, Blümich went on to cancel the names of such Jewish chess Titans as Dr Siegbert Tarrasch, the famed Praeceptor Germaniae, and even Dr Emanuel Lasker himself, the World Chess Champion from 1894–1921....>

<For the past few weeks, Joe Biden has cut a deeply unattractive figure. Unable to escape a lifetime of resentments and mired in self-pity, he has stubbornly bucked his party’s elite. It has been exceedingly difficult to view Biden as anything other than an old man, wildly out of sync with his times.

But the same qualities that have served him so terribly as a candidate were also responsible for his policy successes. Right now, most Democrats can see Biden only as a millstone, but history will remember him as one of the most effective presidents of his era. His fingerprints will be all over the American future.

When Biden came to office, pundits liked to cast him as a placeholder—a well-meaning grandpa who would help restore the country’s equilibrium in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s madness. In Biden’s mind, that was just the members of the elite dismissing him, as they always did. Their underestimation stoked his determination to prove himself as one of history’s great men. He privately boasted that his performance would make him worthy of the presidential pantheon that included Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

With a one-vote majority in the Senate, he audaciously set out to test the limits of what he could accomplish. The American Rescue Plan, passed in the first months of his presidency, pushed social policy in novel directions. It transferred money directly into bank accounts through the child tax credit, the closest the federal government has come to experimenting with universal basic income. For a brief, glorious moment, the legislation helped cut childhood poverty in half.

But the American Rescue Plan was just the early harvest of an exceptionally verdant legislative season. At a moment when Democrats described moderate Republicans as useless toadies, Biden wooed them—and cobbled together bipartisan majorities to pass an infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act. Like Biden, these bills were dismissed as unexciting. But Biden was trying to restore the American state to its postwar glories. Harkening back to Cold War investments in science, the CHIPS bill spends significant cash on research and development, and the infrastructure bill renovates the transit systems, byways of economic competitiveness.

His signature accomplishment was the Inflation Reduction Act, a dreadfully unexciting name for a hugely significant bill. With its subsidies for clean energy, it will be remembered as the first massive American effort to contain climate change. And perhaps just as significantly, it will be remembered as the moment when the nation reembraced industrial policy. That is, the state began using its resources to guarantee the international dominance of American firms in electric vehicles and alternative energies, the industries of the future.

That’s the most surprising part of the Biden presidency. He broke with the economic paradigm that dominated policy in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Whereas those presidents choked when delivering the praise for unions that party politics demanded, Biden walked the picket line and lent presidential prestige to the movement. He reversed several generations of indifference to the problem of monopoly and installed regulators who went after Big Tech ferociously.

His supreme self-confidence allowed him to buck the conventional wisdom of foreign-policy mandarins. Both Barack Obama and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but only Biden had the courage to actually follow through on that decision—although his chaotic execution of a move that voters overwhelmingly supported eroded confidence in his presidency. A devoted believer in old-fashioned transatlanticism, he plowed money and arms into the defense of Ukraine, as if the future of Europe depended on it. These were bold decisions that a president with lesser experience—and a lesser sense of his own acumen—wouldn’t have had the gumption to make...>

<....Biden hates abstraction and pretension. But in his best moments, he could think like a grand strategist. I once heard him extemporaneously describe everything he had done to counter China, and it was impressive to behold. He deepened America’s entanglement with Australia. He helped mend the long rift between Japan and South Korea, so that they could focus on the shared threat they now faced. He successfully schmoozed Narendra Modi, so that India shifted toward the American sphere of influence. Without receiving much credit, he actually managed the pivot to Asia that Obama first promised.

Over the course of Biden’s term, when the press dismissed him as a failure, he kept pushing forward. He never shifted blame onto his aides—and never fired them to cover his own mistakes. He pushed ambitiously, even though he often did so at the risk of his own humiliation.

Before his age became the source of his political demise, it supplied him with wisdom. Before his stubbornness inured him to the inevitable, it carried him to unlikely triumphs. His response to criticism was to always double down on himself.

By running for reelection, despite his advanced age, he was falling back on these very tendencies, disastrously so. Desperately in search of the credit he believed that the world had unfairly denied him, he couldn’t relinquish power. He kept insisting on his own indispensability. By shunning the elites calling for him to drop out, he was also shunning common sense.

But in the end, he has finally relinquished the job he spent his life pursuing. It is evidence that Biden still possesses a politician’s most essential skill, the ability to count noses.>

<An attack line from Ohio Senator JD Vance against Vice President Kamala Harris soon after she was endorsed for the 2024 Democratic nomination by Joe Biden suggests the GOP's potential strategy going forward.

Vance, who was recently confirmed as Donald Trump's running mate in the 2024 election, lashed out at Harris and her "failures" just hours after Biden pulled out of the race and backed her to become the Democrat's next presidential nominee.

In his post on X, formerly Twitter, Vance suggested that Harris should be equally blamed for policies introduced during the Biden campaign and the crisis at the southern border, as well as suggesting that she "lied" about the president's mental and physical well-being.

Vance's comments are an indication on how the GOP may plan to go after Harris from now until November's election. Harris is now the strong favorite to become the 2024 Democratic nominee after Biden ended his reelection campaign on Sunday following weeks of pressure to do so in the wake of his languished CNN debate performance.

"Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right there with him every step of the way," Vance posted.

"Over the last four years she co-signed Biden's open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She owns all of these failures, and she lied for nearly four years about Biden's mental capacity, saddling the nation with a president who can't do the job.

"President Trump and I are ready to save America, whoever's at the top of the Democrat [sic] ticket. Bring it on."

Harris' office has been contacted for comment via email.

Harris was personally tasked by Biden to try to control the surge of migrants crossing the southern border and the administration's response on immigration issues soon after he entered the White House in January 2021.

However, Biden's time in office has been plagued with frequently record-breaking numbers of illegal migrant crossings at the U.S./Mexico border.

Polls have frequently suggested that voters believed Trump would be better at handling the crisis at the southern border than Biden.

Harris was not one of the Democrat figures to have called on Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race amid concerns he would not beat Trump in November.

Harris has already suggested how she intends on attacking Trump in this election campaign.

In a statement confirming she will be seeking the Democratic presidential nomination after Biden ended his campaign, Harris said she plans on defeating Trump and his "extreme Project 2025 agenda" in November.

Trump is also running for a second term in the White House having been the first president in history to be convicted of a crime after he was found guilty of 34 felony falsifying business records charges following his hush money trial. Trump is currently scheduled to be sentenced on September 18, just weeks before the polls open.

After the 81-year-old president ended his campaign, 78-year-old Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history, with indications this is already being pushed as a reason why the Republican should also not be granted a second term.>

<President Joe Biden's reelection campaign officially ended on Sunday, July 21 when he announced that he was dropping out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Harris has since picked up a lot of endorsements from fellow Democrats —including one from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) — and reportedly, Biden's announcement was followed by a cash haul of over $75 million in less than 24 hours.

But some Republicans are accusing Democrats of not playing fair, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana).

On X, formerly Twitter, Johnson posted, "At this unprecedented juncture in American history, we must be clear about what just happened. The Democrat Party forced the Democrat nominee off the ballot, just over 100 days before the election. Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed 'party of democracy' has proven exactly the opposite."

Fox News' Chad Pergram tweeted Johnson's claims, accusing Democrats are "violating" norms.

Pergram posted, "This claims to be the party of democracy. Small d democracy. 14 million people went through the process and chose this nominee, Joe Biden and now got together and decided he's no longer suitable. That's not how this system works. They are violating democratic code. And I think that's the problem and I think there'll be a lot said about that in the days ahead."

Johnson's claims, echoed by Pergram, have drawn plenty of scathing criticism from X users.

Liberal firebrand and former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann wrote, "F--- off, you incomparably unqualified a--clown Go deal with the superannuated mentally declining lunatic atop your own anti-democracy ticket."

Olbermann added, "Also go look up Teddy Roosevelt's decision not to run in 1908."

Trending Politics' Collin Rugg sarcastically posted, "The group of people who have been telling me Trump is a threat to democracy just staged a coup on their democratically nominated candidate? How could this happen?"

Music producer Zenn Gordon wrote, "He willingly dropped out after pressure from Democrats to do so. This isn't an attack on democracy like your disgraced cult leader's failed coup was. Losers don't get any sorer than you MAGA losers."

Trends Journal's Gerald Celelnte tweeted, "You're such a Netanyahu little elf."

Veteran actor Eric Braeden, best known for his work on the daytime soap "The Young and the Restless," posted, "You phoney shouldn't comment on anything regarding the legality of anything in politics! You have not distanced yourself from the most egregious attack on our CAPITOL, have you!! You are irrelevant, brother! If one thing stands out with you, it is your rampant hypocrisy!!">

<Hours after Ohio state senator George Lang (R-Butler) said "'it’s going to take a civil war to save the country" during 2024 GOP vice presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance's "first solo" rally in his hometown of Middletown on Monday, the Republican leader "regrets" his warning.

"I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County's JD Vance are the last chance to save our country,” Lang told the crowd. "Politically, I'm afraid if we lose this one, it's going to take a civil war to save the country — and it will be saved."

US Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) responded to Lang's comments via X, writing, "Don’t say that. Not in Ohio. Not anywhere. No more political violence."

He added, "Win or lose, we’re all still in this together. Everyone must condemn this today to ensure this kind of rhetoric and thinking goes no where [sic] else."

According to Cincinnati television station WLWT, Lang on Monday night posted via X, saying he "regrets his 'divisive remarks.'"

Lang wrote: "Remarks I made earlier today at a rally in Middletown, do not accurately reflect my views. I regret the divisive remarks I made in excitement of the moment on stage. Especially in light of the assassination attempt on President Trump last week, we should all be mindful of what is said at political events, myself included.">

<The Mormon Satan used to command worlds and control a third of the host of heaven. LDS theology, both official and unofficial, credited him with having power over the water, possessing people’s souls and bodies and marshaling demons and other foul spirits to carry out his will.

He was mighty, fearsome. His domain was this entire planet and all its seats of power.

What the heck happened to him?

Now he’s become that voice of chronic self-doubt in your head, telling you that you’re not good enough, and, hey, you really ought to eat that second brownie.

Poor Satan. Or rather, I should say poor “adversary,” because that’s the preferred term we have gravitated toward. As Christian Anderson’s graph of the last half-century of General Conference language shows, in the 1970s “adversary” (in green) was rare, dwarfed by names like “Satan” (in black) and “the devil” (in red). Over time, its usage has mushroomed until “adversary” has become the most popular term.

That shift in language reflects a larger move in theological focus. Recent emphases from church leaders show Satan as the great and terrible spoiler of … self-improvement projects. Here is a sampling of some General Conference talks within the last decade or so that give us hints as to Satan’s evolving job description.

He “seeks to limit your earthly and heavenly potential” by employing tools like deception, distraction and discouragement.

He will be relentless in his attempts to “erode (y)our personal spiritual foundation.”

He will attack your self-esteem and make you feel you’re not good enough.

He’ll distract you from your spiritual path and create “so much noise that it can be difficult to hear the Lord’s voice.”

He is “pleased when parents neglect to teach and train their children to have faith in Christ and be spiritually born again.”

He tries to “weaken … faith and instill disbelief” in your heart.

He “takes every opportunity” to fill your mind “with images of violence and immorality.”

He instills “feelings of fear” that prevent you from doing missionary work.

He is ready to pounce and “establish a foothold in (y)our homes” if you fail to study the Scriptures together as a family.

He will “perpetuate a very real sense of panic” that undermines your ability to see yourself and your family members with an eternal lens.

What all of these have in common is an inward, therapeutic turn toward the self. The adversary now exists to bring individual adversity. In fact, congratulations! He will tailor-make such adversity for each person. He thrives on building hyper-personalized obstacle courses that will trip us up.

To be fair, there’s always been a partial focus on Satan as an individual tempter. The Hebrew word satan (sah-TAHN) means “adversary” or “opponent,” and the idea of Satan as a personal adversary is attested to in the Hebrew Bible, most famously in the Book of Job.

It’s also in the very foundations of the LDS story, since a young Joseph Smith reported being attacked by Satan in the First Vision.

The difference is that in the past, Satan was depicted as both an individual tempter and a cosmic force that could control the elements of nature and bring down whole nations. Today, he’s not both/and so much as either/or. We don’t speak of him exerting physical power over this world, or of seeking to sabotage anything larger than our very own personal spiritual journey.

It is, in the end, all about us....>