Attention to the Unseen

Michael Steele writes: Addressing a reunion of Civil War soldiers in 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant predicted that the dividing line in the nation’s next great conflict “will not be Mason’s or Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” A century and a half later, a once proud Republican Party is convulsing with conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election while desperately trying to recast the insurrection of Jan….

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Michelle Goldberg writes: Violence between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East is often accompanied by spikes in anti-Semitic activity in the United States, but what’s happened over the last week or so has been different. As Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, put it to me, Jewish organizations are somewhat inured to, say, pro-Palestinian graffiti on a synagogue following a protest. What’s new, and more reminiscent of the sort of anti-Semitic aggression common in Europe, is…

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CNN reports: House Republican leaders have condemned incendiary remarks from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene five days after she first publicly compared Capitol Hill mask rules to the Holocaust, amid a wave of criticism from Republican and conservative critics as well as Jewish groups aimed at the Georgia congresswoman and the party leaders’ silence. “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said in…

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Zack Stanton interviews sociologist James Davison Hunter, the author of Culture Wars (1991): [T]here can be a tendency, especially on the political left, to talk about “culture war” issues as being “distractions” that are raised in order to divide people who might otherwise find common cause around, say, shared economic interests. What do you make of that view? We are constituted as human beings by the stories we tell about ourselves. The very nature of meaning and purpose in life…

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Luke Savage writes: If you’ve followed recent Democratic messaging, you’ll have heard that American democracy is under serious attack by the Republican Party, representing an existential threat to the country. If you’ve followed Democratic lawmaking, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the threat is actually a rather piddling one. The disconnect, in this case, isn’t attributable to Democratic embellishment, but to inexcusable complacency. In his first address to Congress, last month, President Joe Biden established three basic themes—each one invoked…

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Politico reports: Roman Protasevich knew something was wrong when Ryanair flight FR4978 that was supposed to take him from Athens to Vilnius diverted toward Minsk. “Don’t do this. They will kill me. I am a refugee,” he reportedly told a flight attendant on Sunday as the airliner headed to the Belarusian capital escorted by a fighter jet. He had reason to be afraid. When the Ryanair plane eventually landed in Vilnius with a more than seven-hour delay, he was no…

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Anne Applebaum writes: The Belarusian regime abused air-traffic-control procedures that are designed to inform pilots about genuine emergencies in order to kidnap a dissident. In other words, this is a story that belongs alongside the Russian use of radioactive poisons and nerve agents against enemies of the Kremlin in London and Salisbury, England; Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of one of its citizens inside a consulate in Istanbul; Iranian assassinations of dissidents in the Netherlands and Turkey; and Beijing’s kidnapping and…

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The Washington Post reports: A series of attacks on Jews in the United States in recent days, linked to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, has increased pressure on law enforcement officials, lawmakers and the Biden administration to take more steps to quell antisemitic violence. Since May 10, at least 26 instances of antisemitism have been reported across the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, according to the Anti-Defamation League and news reports. The cases range from protest…

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Adam Entous writes: In the fall of 2020, [Mark] Vandroff [a retired Navy officer picked by Robert O’Brien, the then new national-security adviser and deputy national-security adviser Matthew Pottinger, to investigate the Havana Syndrome] and his colleagues were shocked by the new cases that came rolling in. One of the most dramatic episodes involved a U.S. military officer stationed in a country with a large Russian presence. As the officer pulled his car into a busy intersection, he suddenly felt…

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