Category Archives: Issues

How much does it matter whether God exists?

Nathan Schneider writes: Two rooms, in two different cities, but pretty much the same scene: one man stands before a few dozen supporters, many of them middle-aged white males, plus a smaller, precocious cohort in early adulthood. As the man speaks, they interrupt him with good, earnest, detailed questions, which he ably answers more or less to their satisfaction. These crowds crave the intricacies of arguments and the upshots of science. The only thing that seems beyond their ken is how their counterparts in the other room could be convinced of something so wrong.

One of those rooms was in New York City, high in an office building overlooking the ruins that then still remained of the World Trade Center; the man was Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist and ‘New Atheist’ polemicist. The man in the other room was his arch-rival, the evangelical Christian philosopher and debater William Lane Craig, speaking in a classroom on the sprawling campus of his megachurch in Marietta, Georgia. If one were to attend both events without understanding English, it would be hard to know the difference.

Whether such a thing as God exists is one of those questions that we use to mark our identities, choose our friends, and divide our families. But there are also moments when the question starts to seem suspect, or only partly useful. Once, backstage before a sold-out debate at the University of Notre Dame between Craig and Sam Harris, Dawkins’s fellow New Atheist, I heard an elderly Catholic theologian approach Harris and spit out: ‘I agree with you more than I do with that guy!’

During the heyday of the New Atheist movement, a few years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was in the wake of a teenage conversion to Catholicism. One might think that my converts’ zeal would pit me squarely against the New Atheist camp. But it didn’t. Really, neither side of the does-God-exist debates seemed to represent me, and the arguments in question had little to do with my embrace of my new-found faith. I had been drawn by the loosey-goosey proposition that love can conquer hate and death, expressed concretely in the lives of monks I had briefly lived among and members of the Catholic Worker Movement who shared their homes with the homeless and abandoned. I actually agreed with most of what the New Atheists wrote about science and free enquiry; what I disagreed most sorely with them about was their hawkish support for military invasions in Muslim-majority countries. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: Nuclear fears and actual dangers


The latest news report ratcheting up fears about ISIS using a dirty bomb is that a security guard at a Belgian nuclear research center was murdered this week and his access badge had been stolen.

Prosecutors now see no connection to a planned terror attack and say his badge was not stolen.

The media is being hasty connecting nuclear dots that turn out not to be connected.

The New York Times reports: Experts say the most remote of the potential nuclear-related risks is that Islamic State operatives would be able to obtain highly enriched uranium. Even the danger of a dirty bomb is limited, they said, because much radioactive waste is so toxic it would likely sicken or kill the people trying to steal it.

Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and editor of the blog Nuclear Diner, said Belgium’s Tihange nuclear plant has pressurized water reactors, inside a heavy steel vessel, reducing the danger that nuclear fuel could leak or spread. She said that the Brussels bombers’ explosive of choice, TATP, might be able to damage parts of the plant but that the damage would shut down the reactor, limiting the radiation damage.

And if terrorists did manage to shut down the reactor and reach the fuel rods, they would have to remove them with a crane to get the fuel out of them, Ms. Rofer said. And then the fuel would still be “too radioactive to go near — it would kill you quickly.” [Continue reading…]

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What makes fighters risk their lives?

Harvey Whithouse writes: Misrata, Libya, 2011. I am ushered into the boardroom of what was once an oil investment corporation. I am surrounded by youths with Kalashnikovs. On the other side of the table are several of Libya’s most respected rebel leaders, foremost among them Salim Jawha, a former colonel in Muammar Gaddafi’s army who defected on the first day of the revolution.

In the preceding months, over 1,000 rebels have been killed and many thousands more horrifically injured. Stories of heroism are commonplace. For example, on March 6, Gaddafi’s forces — supported by seven tanks and some 25 or so vehicles with mounted machine guns — attempted to re-take the city but were ambushed and overcome by rebels. Despite the imbalance of military hardware and heavy loss of life, the rebels prevailed through astonishing courage and determination.

I’m here because I want to know what motivated thousands of civilians, most of whom had never even held a gun before, to take up arms as part of a popular uprising in which death was far likelier than victory. A more general version of this question has been guiding my research for some years, in my work with a wide variety of military groups ranging from tribal warriors in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea to highly trained soldiers in the British special forces and Royal Marines. One of the themes that continually surfaces in these conversations is that fighters don’t put their lives on the line for abstract values like “king and country” or “God, freedom, and democracy.” They do it for each other.

At the University of Oxford, I lead an international network of researchers dedicated to understanding what makes bonds so strong that people will fight and die for the group when it is threatened. Our research suggests that one of the most powerful causes of extreme pro-group action is the sharing of self-defining experiences. If so, this has profound implications for the way we should approach conflict resolution and counter-terrorism. Public debate and policymaking has been dominated for years by the view that extreme beliefs are what motivate extreme behaviors. I disagree — but with such a tide of popular opinion against me, I need evidence not only from the laboratory or even from the assault course and training camp, but also from the frontlines. This has brought me to Libya. [Continue reading…]

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The mafia runs guns for ISIS in Europe

The Daily Beast reports: By the time Aziz Ehsan, a 46-year-old Iraqi, was arrested near Naples on Tuesday, local anti-mafia police had already been trailing him for days to determine just why he was in the heartland of the Camorra crime syndicate’s territory. He was well known by both the French and Belgian secret services, which list him as a suspected ISIS contact. The Neapolitan cops were also aware of an international arrest warrant for him in Switzerland, where he was wanted in connection with a variety of offenses, including forgery, assault, and possession of illegal weapons.

He was apparently just the type of person Italian authorities thought might provide a valuable clue as they work to piece together the details of the complex relationship between Jihadist fighters and Italy’s various mobs.

But when the attacks took place in Brussels, the authorities decided it was time to move in and get him. He was arrested as he slept in a car with Italian license plates registered to a deceased man on Tuesday and is awaiting extradition to Switzerland, France, or Belgium. [Continue reading…]

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Terror cell probe puts spotlight on nuclear concerns

The Wall Street Journal reports: Evidence unearthed in the investigation into the Islamic State cell behind the Paris and Brussels attacks has raised fresh concerns about terrorists’ efforts to get their hands on radioactive material.

Belgium’s federal prosecutor said last month that police had discovered a 10-hour videotape showing the home of a man who worked in Belgium’s “nuclear world” during a house search linked to the Paris attacks. The recording came from a surveillance camera installed in front of the man’s home, a spokesman for the prosecutor said at the time.

The same terrorist cell has been tied to Tuesday’s bloodshed at Brussels’ international airport and a subway station.

Authorities around the globe have long feared that terrorists could get nuclear material to build a so-called dirty bomb—which combines conventional explosives with radioactive materials—or launch an attack on a nuclear power plant. At the same time, Belgium’s nuclear plants, which provide the majority of the country’s electricity, have been criticized for a patchy safety record.

Just hours after the explosions in Brussels, Belgium’s nuclear safety agency, FANC, pulled nonessential staff out of the country’s two plants. Officials said the move was a standard measure when the country is at its highest threat level and they had no indication of a specific threat.

Staff members were back at work on Wednesday with strict security checks and a strong police and military presence, said Geetha Keyaert, a spokeswoman for Electrabel, a unit of France’s Engie SA, which operates Belgium’s nuclear plants. A FANC spokeswoman wouldn’t comment.

Belgium is especially vulnerable as a target because of its homegrown terror threat and the fact that its seven nuclear reactors are at least 30 years old, said Tom Sauer, a nuclear terrorism specialist at Belgium’s University of Antwerp.

Newer plants are protected against threats such as attacks by airplanes, “but in the older Belgian plants, there are still some vulnerable parts,” he said.

Belgian media reported in 2014 that a man who had left for Syria to become a foreign fighter had previously worked at one of the country’s nuclear power plants, which officials have since confirmed. “So there is visibly something wrong with the security clearances,” Mr. Sauer said.

Ms. Keyaert said that the man had regular access to a plant as a contractor before going to Syria in 2012. But while he was working there “he wasn’t radicalized yet,” she said. Unconfirmed local media reports said the man later died in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Pope washes feet of Muslim refugees, says ‘we are brothers’

The Washington Post reports: Pope Francis washed and kissed the feet of Muslim, Christian and Hindu refugees Thursday and declared them all children of the same God, as he performed a gesture of welcome and brotherhood at a time of increased anti-Muslim sentiment following the Brussels attacks.

Francis denounced the carnage as a “gesture of war” carried out by blood-thirsty people beholden to the weapons industry during an Easter Week Mass with asylum-seekers at a shelter in Castelnuovo di Porto, outside Rome.

The Holy Thursday rite re-enacts the foot-washing ritual Jesus performed on his apostles before being crucified, and is meant as a gesture of service. Francis contrasted that gesture with the “gesture of destruction” carried out by the Brussels attackers, saying they wanted to destroy the brotherhood of humanity represented by the migrants.

“We have different cultures and religions, but we are brothers and we want to live in peace,” Francis said in his homily, delivered off-the-cuff in the windy courtyard of the center.

Several of the migrants then wept as Francis knelt before them, poured holy water from a brass pitcher over their feet, wiped them clean and kissed them. [Continue reading…]

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The war on terror has turned the whole world into a battlefield

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Arun Kundnani writes: When opinion polls find that most Muslims think Westerners are selfish, immoral and violent, we have no idea of the real causes. And so we assume such opinions must be an expression of their culture rather than our politics.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have exploited these reactions with their appeals to Islamophobia. But most liberals also assume that religious extremism is the root cause of terrorism. President Obama, for example, has spoken of “a violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation of Islam by a faction — a tiny faction — within the Muslim community that is our enemy, and that has to be defeated.”

Based on this assumption, think-tanks, intelligence agencies and academic departments linked to the national security apparatus have spent millions of dollars since 9/11 conducting research on radicalization. They hoped to find a correlation between having extremist religious ideas, however defined, and involvement in terrorism.

In fact, no such correlation exists, as empirical evidence demonstrates — witness the European Islamic State volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of “Islam for Dummies” or the alleged leader of the November 2015 Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis. But this has not stopped national security agencies, such as the FBI, from using radicalization models that assume devout religious beliefs are an indicator of potential terrorism.

The process of radicalization is easily understood if we imagine how we would respond to a foreign government dropping 22,000 bombs on us. Large numbers of patriots would be volunteering to fight the perpetrators. And nationalist and religious ideologies would compete with each other to lead that movement and give its adherents a sense of purpose.

Similarly, the Islamic State does not primarily recruit through theological arguments but through a militarized identity politics. It says there is a global war between the West and Islam, a heroic struggle, with truth and justice on one side and lies, depravity and corruption on the other. It shows images of innocents victimized and battles gloriously waged. In other words, it recruits in the same way that any other armed group recruits, including the U.S. military.

That means that when we also deploy our own militarized identity politics to narrate our response to terrorism, we inadvertently reinforce the Islamic State’s message to its potential recruits. When British Prime Minister David Cameron talks about a “generational struggle” between Western values and Islamic extremism, he is assisting the militants’ own propaganda. When French President François Hollande talks of “a war which will be pitiless,” he is doing the same.

What is distinctive about the Islamic State’s message is that it also offers a utopian and apocalyptic vision of an alternative society in the making. The reality of that alternative is, of course, oppression of women, enslavement of minorities and hatred of freedom.

But the message works, to some extent, because it claims to be an answer to real problems of poverty, authoritarian regimes and Western aggression. Significantly, it thrives in environments where other radical alternatives to a discredited status quo have been suppressed by government repression. What’s corrupting the Islamic State’s volunteers is not ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in an era with no alternatives to capitalist globalization. The organization has gained support, in part, because the Arab revolutions of 2011 were defeated, in many cases by regimes allied with and funded by the U.S.

After 14 years of the “war on terror,” we are no closer to achieving peace. The fault does not lie with any one administration but with the assumption that war can defeat terrorism. The lesson of the Islamic State is that war creates terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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Poland refuses to accept refugees after Brussels attack

Al Jazeera reports: Poland’s prime minister says his country is no longer prepared to take the 7,000 refugees it agreed to accept in negotiations with the European Union because of the deadly Brussels attacks.

Beata Szydlo said on Wednesday that she does “not see any possibility for the refugees to come to Poland” after explosions rocked the Belgian capital a day earlier, according to Polish broadcaster Superstacja.

Poland had planned to admit an initial 400 refugees this year, and the rest would be allowed in over the next three years.

Last year, thousands of Poles took to the streets and social media to promote participation in anti-refugee marches across the country, organised by far-right nationalist movements such as the National Radical Camp.

In October, President Andrzej Duda said the government should take steps to protect its citizens from refugees bringing in “possible epidemics.” [Continue reading…]

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Lawmakers warn of ‘radical’ move by NSA to share information

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The Hill reports: A bipartisan pair of lawmakers is expressing alarm at reported changes at the National Security Agency that would allow the intelligence service’s information to be used for policing efforts in the United States.

“If media accounts are true, this radical policy shift by the NSA would be unconstitutional, and dangerous,” Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to the spy agency this week. “The proposed shift in the relationship between our intelligence agencies and the American people should not be done in secret.

“NSA’s mission has never been, and should never be, domestic policing or domestic spying.” [Continue reading…]

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How Israel assisted Russia’s military intervention in Syria

The Daily Beast reports: Russia’s sort-of-but-not-really withdrawal from Syria passed without the world noticing that it featured aerial technology from a surprising source —Israel, which provided the high-tech surveillance drones that apparently help the Russian warplanes find and strike their targets on the ground.

The Russian air force acquired a number of 20-foot-long Searcher drones from Israel Aerospace Industries, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of unmanned aerial vehicles, starting in 2010.

Russia also acquired from IAI, which is wholly owned by the Israeli government, a license to make its own copies of the propeller-driven Searcher, a rough equivalent of the U.S. military’s own Predator drone. [Continue reading…]

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Tanya Golash-Boza: How many presidents does it take to deport 11 million people?

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was never birthed; it was always birthered. The man who, as his wife told a Vanity Fair reporter back in 1990, had a book of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bedside, has an unerring eye for how to wield anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments for his own benefit. Back in 2011, while considering a presidential run, he birthed his first version of the birther controversy, the claim that Barack Obama was born not in Hawaii but Kenya and so was the ultimate Muslim outsider (and an illegitimate president). It was his equivalent of dipping a toe in the political waters and testing the temperature before diving in — and he still credits that ludicrous claim with burnishing his reputation. (“I don’t think I went overboard. Actually, I think it made me very popular… I do think I know what I’m doing,” he said in 2013.) This time around, if Donald Trump has proven anything, it’s that he knows exactly what he’s doing and just what impact the symbols he calls up — from that Obama birth certificate to Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio — are likely to have. It’s clear enough that he’s been a student of the trade of demagogue, that he has a natural flair for it, and that when he births a new symbol, it tends to be potent.

None more so than the Wall (which should by now be capitalized). You know just what wall I mean without my writing another word. There’s only been one wall on the planet since his campaign began and, classically enough for our moment, it arrived by escalator. It came full blown, wrapped in a Trumpian ribbon, all 2,000 miles of it strung along the Mexican border of his mind, complete from day one with “rapists,” and the news that “they” were taking our jobs in return for “drugs” and “crime.”

A package deal, that wall arrived full grown on June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump and his present wife, Melania, descended by escalator from the heavens of Trump Tower in New York to announce his presidential bid to the planet. And that wall — the idea, that is, of purifying our American world of “them” by keeping undocumented immigrants out and getting rid of those already here — was from that moment at the heart of everything he did. As he said that day, “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

And they were worth marking. Anyone who has watched his rallies since knows that those words have become the call-and-response chorus at the heart of Trumpismo, our new nativist celebrity religion. That the wall (no less the idea that Mexico will cover the cost of building it) is a fantasy isn’t beside the point, it’s the point itself. What would you expect but a fantasy version of future American life from the presidential candidate nominated by The Apprentice, whose closest adviser is, by his own admission, himself. In such a world, the wish, however malign, is truly the father of reality and the world a fantasy object.

Unfortunately, such fantasies have real consequences, which is why TomDispatch asked Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism, to explore both the walling in and deportation dreams (or nightmares) of Trump and his rival Ted Cruz and what exactly to make of them. Tom Engelhardt

Day of the demagogue
Trumpian deportation fantasies and American realities
By Tanya Golash-Boza

In 2006, when I first began researching deportations, George W. Bush was president and quietly building a deportation machine in the Department of Homeland Security. Outside of small activist circles, few Americans knew that deportations had been rising since 1996 due to legislation signed by President Bill Clinton. Nor could anyone then have imagined that the next President would be a Democrat, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, and would make Bush look like a piker when it came to record-high deportations. Nor, for that matter, would anyone have dreamed that deportation would become a — possibly the — signature issue of the 2016 presidential campaign.

And yet, all of this and more has come to pass in a blistering season of demagoguery, nativism, and outright racism. As again would have been unimaginable a mere decade ago, Republican front-runners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have both promised to deport every last one of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States, the whole lot of them, while as a bonus banning Muslims from the country. Trump gave his particular proposals a special twist by labeling Mexicans coming across the border as “rapists,” and immigrants more generally as “snakes.”

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Scientists warn of perilous climate shift within decades, not centuries

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The New York Times reports: The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.

The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world’s coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.

“We’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control,” said James E. Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who led the new research. The findings were released Tuesday morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

A draft version of the paper was released last year, and it provoked a roiling debate among climate scientists. The main conclusions have not changed, and that debate seems likely to be replayed in the coming weeks.

The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift.

Specifically, the authors believe that fresh water pouring into the oceans from melting land ice will set off a feedback loop that will cause parts of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to disintegrate rapidly. [Continue reading…]

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Carbon emissions highest they have been in 66 million years

Scientific American reports: The rate of carbon emissions is higher than at any time in fossil records stretching back 66 million years to the age of the dinosaurs, according to a study on Monday that sounds an alarm about risks to nature from man-made global warming.

Scientists wrote that the pace of emissions even eclipses the onset of the biggest-known natural surge in fossil records, 56 million years ago, that was perhaps driven by a release of frozen stores of greenhouse gases beneath the seabed.

That ancient release, which drove temperatures up by an estimated 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) and damaged marine life by making the oceans acidic, is often seen as a parallel to the risks from the current build-up of carbon in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

“Given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years,” the scientists wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience. [Continue reading…]

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Would Trump consider launching a tactical nuclear strike against ISIS?

That was a question posed by Fred Ryan, publisher of the Washington Post, in a meeting between Donald Trump and the paper’s editorial board on Monday.

You mentioned a few minutes earlier here you’d knock out ISIS — you’ve mentioned that many times. You’ve also mentioned the risk of putting American troops in a danger area. If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm to ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out ISIS?

Trump: I don’t want to use… I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember, one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counter-puncher.

Note that Trump wouldn’t rule out using nuclear weapons — he merely said he wouldn’t start the process.

Last month Reuters reported that the theft of radioactive material last year “has raised fears among Iraqi officials that it could be used as a weapon if acquired by Islamic State.”

Fears of a nuclear-armed ISIS were fueled today by Britain’s defense minister who confirmed, “this is a new and emerging threat.”

If ISIS was to use a dirty bomb, or, so to speak, start the process, Trump seems to have just strongly inferred that he would throw a “counter-punch” with a tactical nuclear strike. Indeed, maybe the existing warnings are sufficient for Trump to see a process in motion.

It’s hard to imagine a strategic blunder of greater proportions as this would subsequently be seen by friends and foes alike both as an unjustifiable use of American power (deterrence means nothing to ISIS) while also opening the door to a new age of unleashed nuclear force.

That the Trump team is oblivious to the value of refraining from using nuclear weapons became evident in December when campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson said on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor: “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?”

Towards the end of the Post interview, Trump returned to the issue of nuclear weapons after being asked:

Do you think climate change is a real thing? Is it man… human caused?

Trump: I think there is a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change… not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes, and if you look they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things — now they’re using extreme weather I guess more than any other phrase. I am not — I know it hurts me with this room and I know it’s probably a killer with this room — but I am not a believer (perhaps there’s a minor effect) but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.

Don’t good businessmen hedge against risks, not ignore them?

Trump: Well, I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we are at tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of “climate change” is — that we should worry about — is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world to me — I mean I know that President Obama thought climate change — to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That is climate change. That is a disaster. And we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who is trying to get them. The biggest risk for the world and for this country is nuclear weapons — the power of nuclear weapons.

Trump’s thinking process is primitive.

As is sadly commonplace, he doesn’t understand the difference between weather and climate. He uses the language of an anti-intellectual who conspiratorially believes that terminology is designed to bamboozle the uneducated — as though scientists keep on tossing out new phrases all of which simply mean changeable weather. He thinks climate change and extreme weather are interchangeable terms.

But recognizing that as an expression climate change has an emotive yield — that its users hope to generate alarm — he uses it as he has used it before, to circle back to nuclear weapons.

Rather than convey that he truly understands the gravity of having control of a nuclear arsenal, Trump hints that he’s starting to get a tantalizing glimpse of what it might mean for him to grasp that power — and use it.

Would he launch a nuclear strike against ISIS? Trump clearly sees the maximum value in leaving the world guessing.

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Why terrorism doesn’t help Donald Trump

Jamelle Bouie writes: Americans who read outlets like the New York Times woke up to detailed and largely accurate information about Tuesday’s attacks in Brussels, which killed and wounded dozens. Americans who watched cable news, on the other hand, woke up to Donald Trump, who presented these attacks—like the ones in Paris—as a boon for his campaign. “This is a subject that is very dear and near to my heart, because I’ve been talking about it much more than anybody else,” he said. “And it’s probably why I’m No. 1 in the polls. Because of the fact that I say we have to have strong borders. We have to be very vigilant and careful who we allow into our country.”

Meanwhile, some journalists were frustrated with the networks’ choice to give attention to Trump and essentially let him campaign on the destruction in Brussels before the bodies had even been counted. “ ‘Terrorist attacks help Trump’ isn’t a thing that just happens. It happens because after attacks, voters see his face on every TV network,” wrote Jill Filipovic, a columnist for the Guardian. “America may be one major terrorist attack from Donald Trump as president,” said Blake Hounshell, editorial director at Politico.

Both Trump and his critics are operating from the belief that terrorism, even abroad, helps the most reactionary and illiberal candidates in an election. Trump was the chief GOP beneficiary of the Paris attacks, which helped him build a larger lead over his rivals. In an apparently anti-establishment year, with many Americans driven variously by economic anxiety, racism, and deep fears of external threat, it’s easy to believe that Trump could ride the Brussels attack to more votes and a shorter path to the White House.

At the same time, there’s reason to think this just isn’t true. Americans do become more conservative in the face of physical threat. Fears over terrorism, for example, helped George W. Bush win a second term. But Bush was a sitting president who led the national response after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. For millions of Americans, he was a credible voice on the subject.

The same is not true of Donald Trump. As evidenced by his almost absurdist dialogue with the editorial board of the Washington Post, Trump doesn’t know anything about terrorism or national security. [Continue reading…]

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