Gail Collins: Bret, I have to admit that when the subject of Donald Trump comes up these days, I tend to start telling sex-scandal stories. My bad. Bret Stephens: Don’t let me stand in your way. Gail: Right now, that very old Stormy Daniels mess seems to have produced some very scary stuff. Our former […]
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WACO, Texas — In the last 28 months, former President Donald J. Trump has been voted out of the White House, impeached for his role in the Capitol riot and criticized for marching many of his fellow Republicans off an electoral cliff in the 2022 midterms with his drumbeat of election-fraud lies. He dined at […]
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Over the past two months, one subject has repeatedly come up at the trial of five Proud Boys accused of sedition in connection with the storming of the Capitol: the unusual number of informants that the F.B.I. had in or near the group. Even before the trial began, defense lawyers had suggested that the bureau […]
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In the chapel at Mount Carmel, the longtime home of the Branch Davidian sect outside Waco, Tex., the pastor preaches about the coming apocalypse, as the sect’s doomed charismatic leader David Koresh did three decades ago. But the prophecies offered by the pastor, Charles Pace, are different from Mr. Koresh’s. For one thing, they involve […]
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WASHINGTON — As a potential indictment looms over former President Donald J. Trump, he and his allies have sought to tie the Manhattan district attorney bringing the case to a familiar Republican specter: George Soros, the financier and Democratic megadonor. Mr. Soros, who has backed Democratic candidates and causes as well as democracy and human […]
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WASHINGTON — A Pennsylvania woman who steered a group of rioters toward Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on Jan. 6, 2021, and directed others inside the Capitol to steal a laptop computer was sentenced in Federal District Court in Washington on Thursday to three years in prison. The woman, Riley June Williams, 24, was convicted in […]
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When ChatGPT exploded in popularity as a tool using artificial intelligence to draft complex texts, David Rozado decided to test its potential for bias. A data scientist in New Zealand, he subjected the chatbot to a series of quizzes, searching for signs of political orientation. The results, published in a recent paper, were remarkably consistent […]
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Mike Pence wants to have it both ways. He wants to be the conservative hero of Jan. 6: the steadfast Republican patriot who resisted the MAGA mob and defended the institutions of American democracy. “Make no mistake about it,” Pence said at the Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, D.C., this month: “What happened that day […]
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Donald J. Trump’s call over the weekend for his supporters to protest his expected indictment has divided his allies on the right, as some fear mass gatherings could devolve into violence and lead to the prosecution of his supporters just as the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol did two years ago. While some Republicans […]
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Four people who marched with the Oath Keepers militia into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were convicted on Monday of conspiracy to obstruct the work of Congress, bringing an end to the third and final trial examining the role that members of the far-right group played in the attack. The four defendants — Sandra […]
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He would be fingerprinted. He would be photographed. He could even be handcuffed. And if Donald J. Trump is indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in the days ahead for his role in a hush money payment to a porn star, the former president of the United States of America will be read the standard […]
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“If it wasn’t for that incident, we would not be on the board,” Mr. Rohe said. He said the hospital had dismissed concerns about its Covid protocols from ordinary taxpayers who did not feel like Sarasota Memorial, a 901-bed facility, was catering to their needs. “Nobody wants to talk about that,” Mr. Rohe said. “So […]
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HOUSTON — The Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones, who faces more than $1.4 billion in legal damages for defaming the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, has devised a new way to taunt them: wriggling out of paying them the money they are owed. Mr. Jones, who has an estimated net worth as high […]
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Within three days and 160 miles of each other, two divergent paths of New York’s Republican Party were on full display last week. The first came at a subterranean bar in Little Italy in Manhattan, where Roger J. Stone Jr. held court as more than 200 millennial and millennial-adjacent Republicans nibbled on miniature pigs-in-a-blanket decorated with tiny […]
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Donald Trump may finally be indicted. Finally! The Manhattan district attorney’s office has signaled that charges, related to Trump’s reported hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, are likely. But there’s also hand-wringing: about whether this is the best case to be the first among those in which Trump is likely to be criminally […]
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Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel laureate whose intense novels and defiant politics challenged a modern Japanese culture that he found morally vacant and dangerously tilted toward the same mind-set that led to catastrophe in World War II, died on March 3. He was 88. His publisher, Kodansha, announced the death on Monday. It did not specify […]
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Leonard Leo, a leader of the right-wing Federalist Society, an extraordinarily effective legal organization, is broadening his ambitions. Leo is hoping to transform American culture the way he transformed the judiciary. In the words of an investigative report produced by ProPublica and Documented, he aims to build a sort of “Federalist Society for everything,” devoted […]
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One exception is Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who addressed the complexity of the debate in an email: Higher ed and K-12 are different. States are on much firmer ground in seeking to establish or constrain what gets taught in K-12 education, where the concept of academic freedom simply doesn’t […]
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Donald J. Trump has for decades trafficked in the language of vengeance, from his days as a New York developer vowing “an eye for an eye” in the real estate business to ticking through an enemies ledger in 2022 as he sought to oust every last Republican who voted for his impeachment. “Four down and […]
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From the start, prosecutors overseeing the trial of five Proud Boys charged with sedition in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have faced a conundrum. Scores of members of the far-right group took part in the storming of the Capitol and often played a decisive role in breaching barricades and […]
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“They were in the process of dismantling the institution,” said Tony Stewart, the secretary of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, which drafted the complaint. Mr. Regan argued that Mr. Stewart’s organization, which formed in the 1980s to combat white supremacists who were active in Kootenai County, had strayed far from its mission. […]
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About two weeks ago, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia kicked off a conversation about a “national divorce,” and it hasn’t really stopped. Greene says she doesn’t mean a true national division, but rather an extreme form of federalism, in which red and blue states essentially lived under completely different economic and constitutional structures while […]
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The court documents, released on Feb. 16 and Monday, contain evidence that Dominion uncovered in its discovery process. The filings include snippets of depositions, as well as emails, text messages and instant messages among Fox executives, such as Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, and hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Dominion, which makes voting […]
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As the testimony of Jeremy Bertino, the government’s star witness in the Proud Boys sedition trial, came to an end this week, there was a moment that crystallized the challenges the prosecution has faced throughout the marathon proceeding. For five days, Mr. Bertino — a former Proud Boy from North Carolina — told the jury […]
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Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argued that the Republican Party has, over time, encompassed an extremist fringe that has not so much grown in recent years, but has gained a loudspeaker in the form of social media. In an email she wrote: I do not see any change in the broader Republican Party. […]
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But some former leaders of the American Conservative Union say Mr. Schlapp refocused the event from a broad spectrum of conservative debate to the fringes of Trumpism. As mainstream corporate sponsors like Google and Facebook moved away from the event, Mr. Schlapp courted companies more associated with Mr. Trump’s brand of politics. Figures once banned […]
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This week I’ve been watching “Babylon Berlin,” a television show about detectives in Weimar Germany, which has so captivated me that I barreled straight through the new season and then started rewatching the whole series from the beginning. The show is a noir detective series, set in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, […]
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A democracy — imperfect, as all nations are, but aspiring to be part of the free world — is invaded by its much larger neighbor, a vicious dictatorship that commits mass atrocities. Defying the odds, the democracy beats back an attack most people expected to succeed in a matter of days, then holds the line […]
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The fever pitch of distrust was understandable for a community that saw what appeared to be an apocalyptic plume of chemicals rise from the wreckage on the rail line, then filmed dead fish and frogs in East Palestine’s streams and complained of headaches, sore throats, coughing and skin rashes — all as government officials assured […]
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In a letter to fellow Democrats on Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said the speaker was “needlessly exposing the Capitol complex to one of the worst security risks since 9/11.” “By handpicking Tucker Carlson, Speaker McCarthy laid bare that this sham is simply about pandering to MAGA election […]
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WASHINGTON — As a gang of Proud Boys stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Jeremy Bertino, one of the leaders of the far-right group, was at home in North Carolina, watching livestreams of the riot and offering advice to his compatriots on the ground. Recovering from stab wounds he sustained during an earlier pro-Trump […]
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