USA

What should the Europeans have done with the New World?

Last month, in the middle of the COVID panic, a group of freshmen at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’.

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden, shortly after the FBI raided the home of former President Donald J. Trump, responded to a tweet by Michael Beschloss in a way that, apart from disregarding any presumption of innocence, seemingly endorsed the idea that Trump was a spy who, for allegedly having taken classified documents, should be executed by the government, as the Rosenbergs were in 1953 for having passed US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. “Sounds about right,” Hayden wrote over of photograph of the Rosenbergs on Twitter.

Full disclosure There is a bit of history between Hayden and me. I opposed his nomination to be CIA director, by saying at the time, “Bottom line: I do believe he’s the wrong person, the wrong place at the wrong time.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Soldiers are leaving the Army National Guard at a faster rate than they are enlisting, fueling concerns that in the coming years units around the country may not meet military requirements for overseas and other deployments.

For individual states, which rely on their Guard members for a wide range of missions, it means some are falling short of their troop totals this year, while others may fare better. But the losses comes as many are facing an active hurricane season, fires in the West and continued demand for units overseas, including combat tours in Syria and training missions in Europe for nations worried about threats from Russia.

California’s governor is a leading contender for 2024. But there’s a problem.

Gavin Newsom appears to be making a presidential bid.

Aside from placing full-page ads in Texas newspapers and funding billboards in Indiana — efforts designed to raise his national profile — the California governor is exercising some uncharacteristic moderation. He vetoed drug-injection sites for addicts, for instance, a turnabout from his election pledge in California. What’s changed is not his desire to shoot up junkies but rather his fear that Michiganders or Arizonans may not take well to such a program.

Karen and Steve don’t want to take up arms. But if Republicans lose in November this elderly Arizona couple say a civil war is coming and, yes, they will fight. They have discussed it between them, and feel that taking up arms is their best option. It was at this point that our conversation grew a little dark and my faith in the strength of American democracy grew a little shaky.

I met the Slatons at their Trump paraphernalia store in Show Low, Arizona. It was one of the first stops on a month-long road trip that I took around America this summer, a journey to understand why the upcoming elections feel so consequential, perhaps even a little ominous.