Women can land a Boeing 787 in Saudi Arabia but aren’t allowed to drive a car out of the airport

The Washington Post reports: The photograph above may seem relatively innocuous, but to many observers, it shows a rebellion.

The image, which was shared by Royal Brunei’s Instagram account last month, shows the airline’s first all-female flight crew sitting in the cabin of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Royal Brunei announced the introduction of its first all-female flight crew late last month, making it the latest in a string of airlines to mark the milestone.

However, it wasn’t just the pilots’ sex that brought attention: It was where they were flying to.

At the time the photograph was taken, Capt. Sharifah Czarena and her two female first officers were about to fly from Brunei to Jiddah, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia — a country where women are not allowed to drive. [Continue reading…]

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What we could learn from bonobos

Cari Romm writes: In a lot of ways, we have more in common with chimpanzees than we do with bonobos. Both species of ape are considered humans’ genetically closest living relatives, but chimpanzees live in patriarchal societies, start wars with their neighbors, and, as a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences put it, “do not take kindly to strangers.”

By contrast, bonobos, which form female-dominated societies, have no problem welcoming outsiders into the fold: They mate, share food, and readily form bonds with strangers. They’re also great at defusing conflicts before they escalate — when bonobos stumble upon a new feeding ground, for example, they tend to celebrate with group sex before eating, a habit researchers believe is meant to relieve tension that could otherwise translate into competition for food.

We do share some things with the warmer, fuzzier contingent of our ape family tree: In 2013, for example, researchers from Emory University found strong similarities between the emotional development of young bonobos to that of human children. But in the recent PNAS paper, a team of researchers from the Netherlands found one more difference: Where humans are primed to pay more attention to threats, bonobos are more captivated by examples of cooperation. [Continue reading…]

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White voters hope Trump will restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama

Jamelle Bouie writes: In a nation shaped and defined by a rigid racial hierarchy, [Barack Obama’] election was very much a radical event, in which a man from one of the nation’s lowest castes ascended to the summit of its political landscape. And he did so with heavy support from minorities: Asian Americans and Latinos were an important part of Obama’s coalition, and black Americans turned out at their highest numbers ever in 2008.

For liberal observers, this heralded a new, rising electorate, and — in theory — a durable majority. “The future in American politics belongs to the party that can win a more racially diverse, better educated, more metropolitan electorate,” wrote Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post after the 2008 election. “It belongs to Barack Obama’s Democrats.”

For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.

In a 2011 paper, Robin DiAngelo — a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University — described a phenomenon she called “white fragility.” “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” she writes. “These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

DiAngelo was describing private behavior in the context of workplace diversity training, but her diagnosis holds insight for politics. You can read the rise of Obama and the projected future of a majority nonwhite America as a racial stress that produced a reaction from a number of white Americans — and forced them into a defensive crouch. You can see the maneuvering DiAngelo describes in the persistent belief that Obama is a Muslim — as recently as last fall, 29 percent of Americans held this view, against all evidence. It is a way to mark Obama as “other” in a society where explicit anti-black prejudice is publicly unacceptable. Consistent with this racialized fear and anxiety is the degree to which white Americans now see “reverse discrimination” as a serious problem in national life. For its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks respondents whether “discrimination against whites is a significant problem.” In last year’s survey, 43 percent of Americans — including 60 percent of working-class whites — said discrimination against whites had become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The anxieties DiAngelo describes, and the fears cataloged by the American Values Survey, have real political impact. In a 2014 study, political scientists Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson tried to measure “perceived status threat” from a shift in racial demographics, surveying how people responded when informed that California is now home to more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians than non-Hispanic whites. In other words, how do white Americans react to unrelated political questions when exposed to news of a “majority-minority” future? The results were clear. “Making the majority-minority shift in California salient led politically unaffiliated white Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party,” wrote Craig and Richeson. Likewise, “making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political party affiliation) to endorse both race-related and relatively race-neutral conservative policy positions more strongly.”

The Obama era didn’t herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racialized one, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about their racial status. [Continue reading…]

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The Intercept, busy denouncing critics of Trump, now says media hasn’t done enough to denounce Trump

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Glenn Greenwald writes:

As Donald Trump’s campaign predictably moves from toxic rhetoric targeting the most marginalized minorities to threats and use of violence, there is a growing sense that American institutions have been too lax about resisting it. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan on Sunday posted a widely cited Twitter essay voicing this concern, arguing that “Trump’s rise represents a failure in American parties, media, and civic institutions — and they’re continuing to fail right now.” He added, “Someone could capture a major party [nomination] who endorses violence [and] few seem alarmed.”

Actually, many people are alarmed, but it is difficult to know that by observing media coverage, where little journalistic alarm over Trump is expressed.

Really? Everywhere I look there has been no shortage of voices of alarm — everywhere other than, perhaps, The Intercept.

Greenwald and his colleagues have too often seemed more concerned about the hypocrisy of Trump’s critics than about Trump.

On March 4, for instance, Greenwald wrote:

in many cases, probably most, the flamboyant denunciations of Trump by establishment figures make no sense except as self-aggrandizing pretense, because those condemning him have long tolerated if not outright advocated very similar ideas, albeit with less rhetorical candor.

The same day, The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz wrote:

Over 90 “members of the Republican national security community” have now signed an open letter to express their united opposition to a Donald Trump presidency. The letter makes many reasonable criticisms of Trump for his “military adventurism,” “embrace of the expansive use of torture,” and “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin.”

But some of Trump’s critics have no standing here, given that they’ve publicly supported or even directly participated in the same kinds of things for which they are now criticizing him.

At the end of February, The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani saw “Trump moving the GOP to a more dovish direction” — the context of that dubious prediction being the fact that Trump’s success “is setting off alarm bells among neoconservatives who are worried he will not pursue the same bellicose foreign policy that has dominated Republican thinking for decades.”

One gets the sense that at The Intercept, a resurgence of the neocons strikes louder alarm bells than Trump’s rising power.

But today Greenwald writes:

Imagine calling yourself a journalist, and then — as you watch an authoritarian politician get closer to power by threatening and unleashing violence and stoking the ugliest impulses — denouncing not that politician, but, rather, other journalists who warn of the dangers.

Except that seems to be pretty much what Greenwald himself and his colleagues have been doing.

Sounding the alarm about Trump has been the mainstay of the mainstream media for months — even though that alarm has often been diluted by the false expectation that Trump would cause his own campaign to implode.

The problem for those whose own overriding preoccupation is criticism of the establishment/government/media has been a reluctance to echo a mainstream critique of Trump and thereby risk appearing to be in alignment with the forces one rigidly opposes.

Those who pound too hard on the anti-establishment drum are opening up a real danger in November.

If, as seems likely, it comes down to a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, a significant number of Bernie Sanders’ current supporters may decide not to vote for the establishment candidate, Clinton, and some may even opt for Trump, not because they agree with him but because they see intrinsic value in shaking up the system.

If, for the sake of his readers, Glenn Greenwald wants to unequivocally register the degree to which he is indeed alarmed by Trump, maybe he can say right away that in a Clinton vs. Trump general election, in spite of the mountain of misgivings he has about Clinton, he will nevertheless vote for her. But maybe he won’t.

(And just in case anyone is wondering: In my state’s primary, I just voted for Bernie Sanders. If the general election turns out to be Clinton vs. Trump, I’ll vote for Clinton.)

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February smashes Earth’s all-time global heat record by a jaw-dropping margin

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Jeff Masters and Bob Henson write: On Saturday, NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report. February 2016 has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more than a century of global recordkeeping. NASA’s analysis showed that February ran 1.35°C (2.43°F) above the 1951-1980 global average for the month, as can be seen in the list of monthly anomalies going back to 1880. The previous record was set just last month, as January 2016 came in 1.14°C above the 1951-1980 average for the month. In other words, February has dispensed with this one-month-old record by a full 0.21°C (0.38°F)–an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by. Perhaps even more remarkable is that February 2015 crushed the previous February record–set in 1998 during the peak atmospheric influence of the 1997-98 “super” El Niño that’s comparable in strength to the current one–by a massive 0.47°C (0.85°F). [Continue reading…]

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German election: Is this really a verdict on Merkel’s open door to refugees?

By Katharina Karcher, University of Cambridge

Three German federal states have elected new parliaments in regional votes that have seen major gains made by Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party that wants drastically to reduce immigration to Germany.
State parliaments in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt have been reshuffled, although the AfD didn’t actually come first in any of the votes.

These elections were being framed as a verdict on Merkel’s “open-door” refugee policy. Critics of her pro-refugee stance have been eager to observe that it has isolated her in her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and alienated many voters. Now, they say, the electorate has punished the whole party for Merkel’s single-handed attempt to help refugees.

At first glance, it seems they were right. The CDU has lost votes in all three federal states, and more than a few former CDU voters have switched to supporting the AfD.

The anti-Merkel, anti-establishment, anti-immigration rhetoric appealed particularly to voters in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD became the second-strongest party. It also secured good results in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, winning more than 10% of the vote.

But to suggest that Merkel’s refugee policy sent voters “flocking to the populist party” is wrong, even dangerous.

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German elections: AfD’s remarkable gains don’t tell the whole story

The Guardian reports: The results for German anti-refugee party Alternative für Deutschland in Sunday’s regional elections are remarkable: it won 15% of the vote in Baden-Württemberg, 12.5% in Rhineland-Palatinate and more than 24% in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt – the strongest showing for a rightwing, populist party since the end of the second world war.

The last time these three states voted (in 2011), AfD didn’t even exist. Whatever way you look at the numbers, the AfD result is significant. However, the prevailing narrative in swaths of the press on Monday morning – that the results are a rejection of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy – is simplistic.

Here’s why. In Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD did best, the vote for Merkel’s CDU held. The party dropped less than three points compared with 2011.

According to an exit poll for the state, a substantial majority of voters across all parties, except the AfD, prefers an open and tolerant society to a traditional one. The strongest source of AfD support, in the east German state and elsewhere, were previous non-voters (in all three states turnout was up by 10 points): [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The German government will stick by its existing refugee policy, a spokesman has said, after the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland made strong gains in regional elections on Sunday.

Asked if the results in three German states, where support for chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives dwindled, would lead to a change in policy, Steffen Seibert said: “The German government will continue to pursue its refugee policy with all its might both at home and abroad.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin orders ‘main part’ of Russian army to start Syria pullout

Bloomberg reports: President Vladimir Putin ordered the “main part” of Russia’s military forces to begin withdrawing from Syria, saying it’s completed its primary objectives after an almost six-month campaign.

Russia, which has urged Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad to be “constructive” during the latest round of peace talks, should begin the pullout on Tuesday, Putin said. A Russian air base and a naval facility will continue to function, he said in Moscow. Assad has been informed of the withdrawal, said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.

“The effective work of our military created the conditions for the beginning the peace process,” Putin said during talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. “I hope today’s decision will be a good signal to all the conflicting sides. I hope this will significantly increase the level of confidence of all participants of the settlement process in Syria and will contribute to the solution of the Syrian issue through peaceful means.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama blithely sells out his allies and millions of Syrians in legacy interview

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

In the last months of his administration, US President Bill Clinton tried to resolve the Israel-Palestine dispute. The effort fell short, but it was the closest anyone came to resolving the conflict since the creation of the Israeli State in 1948.

In the last months of his administration, President Barack Obama is giving interviews to explain how everyone else is to blame for the five-year Syrian conflict – which has supplanted the Israeli-Palestinian issue as the region’s destabilising centre and shows no sign of receding.

Rather than evaluate what could be done to mitigate the damage, Obama has chided allies such as Britain, Germany, and France. He has implicitly lashed out at his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as she campaigns to succeed him. And he has shown little regard for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have been killed and the millions who have been displaced, and who will continue to die and flee in his final months in office.

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How the Syrian revolt went so horribly, tragically wrong

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Liz Sly reports: From Egypt to Yemen, Libya to Bahrain, the brief flowering of freedom and hope that surged across the Middle East five years ago has failed more spectacularly than could have been imagined back when people chanting for freedom thronged the streets of towns and cities regionwide.

Syria marks the fifth anniversary of its first peaceful protest Tuesday in the shadow of a brutal war that has sucked in global powers and fueled the rise of radicals such as the Islamic State. Libya and Yemen are likewise locked in savage conflicts.

In other countries, such as Egypt, autocratic regimes have reasserted their control with a vengeance, clamping down on liberties even more fiercely than had been the case before the demonstrations were held.

In all of them, except Tunisia, the moderates who dominated the early days of the revolts have been silenced, imprisoned, hunted down or driven into exile, either by the governments that sought to repress them or the extremists who moved into the vacuum created when state authority collapsed.

Whether those early protesters were ever truly representative is in question, said Rami Nakhla, one of the most prominent leaders of the early Syrian protests, directing the Local Coordination Committees from exile in Beirut. He now lives in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep near Syria’s border, a hub for many of the activists who have been forced to flee.

But he also wonders whether they ever stood a chance. “We are hostage to two choices: either the authoritarians or the extremist Islamists,” he said. “Should we accept this equation? That we endorse either dictatorship or Islamic extremism?”

It is a false choice, but it has served to sustain the twin tyrannies that proved the undoing of the Arab Spring, said Shadi Hamid of the Washington-based Brookings Institution. Since well before the revolts, the region’s dictators have raised the specter of Islamist extremism to scare ordinary citizens into submission and justify their harsh oppression to foreign powers. And extremists exploit the climate of fear to win recruits and justify their own brutal tactics.

“Authoritarian regimes and groups like ISIS both rely on violence and oppression to promote their political objectives,” he said, using another term for the Islamic State. “For regimes, it’s actually a successful strategy, at least in the case of Egypt and Syria. The Assad regime has been able to promote its own narrative very successfully, and many members of the international community say the armed opposition is primarily a radical opposition, that there are no moderate rebels.” [Continue reading…]

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One-third of Syrian children were born during war, Unicef report finds

The New York Times reports: One-third of all Syrian children were born in the five years that conflict has convulsed their country, the United Nations said on Monday in a report that suggests a new lost generation.

More than 300,000 of these children, who total about 3.7 million, were born as refugees, according to the report by Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. It said their lives had been “shaped by violence, fear and displacement.”

In all, Unicef estimated that 8.4 million Syrian children, or 80 percent of Syria’s 18-and-under population, are in urgent need of humanitarian aid, either in Syria or in neighboring countries. [Continue reading…]

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161 chemical weapons attacks in Syria’s war, new report says

The Associated Press reports: As Syria marks five full years of civil war this month, a new report claims that chemical weapons have been used at least 161 times through the end of 2015 and caused 1,491 deaths. It says such attacks are increasing, with a high of at least 69 attacks last year, and 14,581 people have been injured in all.

The Syrian American Medical Society says its report released Monday is the most comprehensive listing of chemical weapons attacks in Syria so far. The U.S.-based nonprofit, which supports more than 1,700 workers at over 100 medical centers in Syria, says the list is based primarily on the reports of medical personnel who have treated victims, aided by NGOs and other local sources.

The organization is asking the 15-member U.N. Security Council and the international community to quickly identify perpetrators and hold them accountable through the International Criminal Court or other means. Much of the report’s documentation has been shared with the global chemical watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Syria’s government has been repeatedly accused by the United States and other Western countries of using chemical weapons on its own people, even after the Security Council in 2013 ordered the elimination of its chemical weapons program following an attack on a Damascus suburb that killed hundreds of civilians.

The council last year also condemned the use of toxic chemicals like chlorine after growing reports of barrel bombs filled with chlorine gas being dropped on opposition-held areas. Chlorine is widely available and not officially considered a warfare agent, but its use as a weapon is illegal. The new report notes at least 60 deaths from chlorine attacks.

The report also says 77 percent of the chemical weapons attacks it documented occurred after the Security Council’s order in 2013, and 36 percent occurred after the council condemned the use of chlorine last year. [Continue reading…]

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The war on the Syrian insurgency continues in plain sight

Faysal Itani and Hossam Abouzahr write: It has been two weeks since a US-Russia brokered cessation of hostilities in Syria came into effect. Many analysts including these authors were skeptical about its prospects, due to the agreement’s terms and the regime’s perceived interests. Skeptics expected the regime and its allies to exploit a clause allowing attacks on the al-Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front, using it as cover for continuing the air campaign on non-jihadist opposition groups. There is substantial evidence, however, that something rather different is happening. Even as overall violence is greatly reduced, regime forces are openly bombing and in some cases launching ground operations to capture key rebel territory, without making any pretense of attacking the Nusra Front. This behavior offers some insight into long-term regime plans, and highlights how little leverage outside powers including the United States will have in shaping the new status quo in Syria.

The Syria Campaign established the Syria Ceasefire Monitor to monitor military operations and report alleged violations during the cessation of hostilities. It compiles data from multiple local sources including the Syrian Civil Defense, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and local coordination committees in opposition-held territory. The standard caveats about the reliability of reporting from the Syrian war zone apply. Nevertheless the Syrian Ceasefire Monitor seems to be the best open-source monitoring effort on ceasefire violations, covering geography, weapons used, casualties inflicted, and identifying violators and whether they had aimed to capture ground.

The Syria Ceasefire Monitor reports 111 violations as of March 9–almost all perpetrated by regime or Russian forces. Attacks mostly targeted insurgent territory in Homs, Hama, Idlib, Latakia, Aleppo, Damascus, and Deraa. Air strikes and ground operations in Idlib very likely targeted the Nusra Front, but the regime and Russia also attacked opposition territory in which the Nusra Front had little or no presence. The clearest examples were attacks on a large, encircled opposition pocket in southern Hama and northern Homs provinces. [Continue reading…]

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Al-Qaida seizes weapons, bases from U.S.-backed Syrian rebels

The Associated Press reports: Al-Qaida militants swept through a rebel-held town in northern Syria in a display of dominance Sunday, arresting U.S.-backed fighters and looting weapons stores belonging to the Free Syrian Army.

The militants belonging to the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front along with allied jihadists have been moving to exert their authority over rebel-held areas in Idlib province since a partial ceasefire to the country’s five-year conflict took effect two weeks ago, extinguishing patriotic demonstrations and sidelining nationalist militias.

The FSA’s 13th Division said on Twitter Sunday that Nusra fighters were going door to door in the town of Maarat Numan and arresting its cadres after Nusra, alongside fighters from the Jund al-Aqsa faction, seized Division 13 posts the night before. [Continue reading…]

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Is it possible to get 15% of your calories from sugar and still be healthy?

By Claire Marriott, University of Brighton

It would be fair to say that most of us lead a life far removed from our hunter-gatherer days. Consequently, studies into remote tribes, and the effect of their diet and foraging behaviour, have been used to try to understand the effect of our modern lifestyle on conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Members of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer community from Tanzania, obtain 15% of their calories from honey. They have a relatively long life expectancy and little to no incidence of metabolic disease.

Research suggests that people in the UK consume an almost equivalent amount of sugar (guidelines recommend no more than 5%) yet there is an obesity epidemic, with a comparable increase in the number of people developing type 2 diabetes. So, are the guidelines wrong? Or are we simply consuming the wrong kind of sugar? If we replaced all table sugar with honey would we see a dramatic decrease in the number of people who develop type 2 diabetes?

Perhaps predictably, it’s not that simple. A hunter-gatherer tribe will spend a large proportion of their time, well, hunting and gathering – a less common urban activity these days. A diet containing such high levels of honey is going to have a very different effect on a population with higher physical activity. We would definitely need to move a lot more to earn that 15%. Although obesity is an incredibly complex condition (as the graphic below shows), the benefits of exercise on physical (and mental) well-being can’t be argued.

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Trump takes cue from Assad by casting critics as terrorists

A couple of days ago, a Syrian-American tweeted:


Even though Trump didn’t make the call, he clearly has no shame in following Assad’s example by accusing a protester of having ties to ISIS after rushing the stage at a Dayton rally.


Needless to say, Trump’s accusation is baseless, as Heavy.com reports:

Tommy Dimassimo, a student at Wright State University in Dayton, has been an avid supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and Vermont Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on social media.

The video [which Trump tweeted] seems to have been created by a troll, the same person who started a Facebook page called “Tommy dimassimo wasn’t hugged enough as a kid.”

The Arabic caption on the original video appears to be a joke, including a phrase that roughly translates to saying Dimassimo thought he’d be a big man by standing on the American flag, but really has a small penis.

When George Bush launched the war on terrorism, his rhetoric was a bountiful gift to tyrants around the world. In its response to 9/11, the U.S. had effectively issued a free license for global political oppression which could henceforth all be conducted in the name of fighting terrorism.

Donald Trump has brought that gift back home and anyone who wonders how he would operate as president, merely needs to see how he now demonizes his adversaries.

Yet among some reactionary anti-imperialists, there is a notion that, bad as Trump might be, Hillary Clinton would be worse. Clinton is supposedly the ultimate war-maker whereas Trump strangely gets cast as some sort of man of peace.

For instance, at Counterpunch, William Blum says of Trump:

He speaks of Russia and Vladimir Putin as positive forces and allies, and would be much less likely to go to war against Moscow than Clinton would.

On the Syrian dictator, Trump said last September: “Assad, to me, looks better than the other side,” and in January he claimed that Clinton and Obama “created ISIS.”

Those who want to see Trump as an anti-interventionist should note that in the same speech in Biloxi, Mississippi, he proudly asserted in front of a crowd of thousands of supporters, “I am the most militaristic person in this room.”

On the nuclear deal that Obama struck with Iran, Trump warns: “I will police that [deal], to a level that they [Iran] will not believe even exists.”

Anyone who thinks that a president Trump who has vowed to expand America’s military strength would turn out to be a stabilizing influence in the world, seems to be indulging in wishful thinking.

But let’s suppose that Trump did indeed turn out not to start any wars overseas, there isn’t a shred of evidence that he has the capacity to be the “great unifier” at home that he claims to be.

Trump builds unity in the same way that every tyrant employs: by fomenting hatred of the enemy.

The enemy is a revolving target. It alternates between immigrants, Muslims, the media, China, and now, disruptive protesters.

The result of this approach is always the same: division.

Although he keeps on winning primary after primary, Trump is viewed across America more unfavorably than any other major candidate — and yet he’s likely to become the Republican nominee.

He may even become president. As he correctly says, Clinton’s supporters lack “fervor,” while Bernie Sanders faces a struggle in the Democrat delegate count.

The risk is that out of cynicism about the political process, or out of a sense perhaps that America might be getting what it deserves, Trump’s half-hearted critics may hand him power — power gained not because of the breadth of his support but because too many people underestimated the threat he poses to this country.

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