Time: #PolishStonewall: LGBTQ Activists Are Rallying Together After Police Violence at Protests in Warsaw

 By Saturday, thousands had gathered in Warsaw to denounce Margo’s arrest and police aggression against LGBTQ people. And although Poland is experiencing a rise in new cases of COVID-19, at least 15 solidarity protests, both big and small, took place on Monday in towns and cities across the Poland, as well as in Budapest and London, New York, Paris and Berlin, with more planned.

While not all activists may agree with Margo’s methods, her prosecution and imprisonment has been widely condemned. “These radical actions are a part of history that has happened in many other countries before,” says Julia Maciocha, chairwoman at the Warsaw-based LGBTQ organization Volunteers of Equality Foundation. In a nod to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York City, several users on Twitter started posting #PolishStonewall in tweets about the weekend’s events and subsequent solidarity protests. [...]

The church in Poland also wields enormous influence over education, law and politics, and about 86% of the population identify as Roman Catholic. Marek Jedraszewski, an archbishop, warned last year that a “rainbow plague” seeks to “control” the population. Since 2019, authorities in one-third of cities across Poland have adopted resolutions declaring themselves “LGBTQ ideology free zones.” In late July, the European Union announced it would not provide funding to six Polish towns that made this declaration.[...]

What activists want now is stronger international solidarity, particularly from European governments. Remy Bonny, a Brussels-based LGBTQ rights activist and researcher who focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, says “we have seen this kind of violence in Russia and Belarus, for example, but not in an E.U. country.” The European Commission should condemn police violence in Poland in the same way it recently denounced the repression of protests in Belarus, he says. Makuchowska says she and other activists are calling on the international community to “help us to immediately release Margo.”

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Time: The coronavirus is causing Trump's supporters to abandon him

One of the defining questions of the 2020 election is how many Trump voters feel in November like Heidi and Dennis Hodges do now. Over the past four years, Trump has developed a Teflon mystique: no matter what he says or does, nothing seems to stick to him. Predicting that the latest outrage will finally sever his bond with supporters has been a mug’s game. And even as the coronavirus crisis escalated in March and April, there have been few signs that this is changing: 93% of self-described Republicans said during the first half of April that they approved of Trump’s performance, according to Gallup—up two points from a month prior.

Yet there is also little question that the pandemic has transformed the election. Two months ago, Trump was an incumbent president riding a strong economy and a massive cash advantage; today, he looks like an underdog in November. The RealClearPolitics polling average has former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leading Trump 48.3% to 42% nationally. Trump’s prospects aren’t any brighter right now when broken down by states that were key to his 2016 victory. According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan, and 2.7 points in Wisconsin. Biden is also leading Trump narrowly in Florida and Arizona. [...]

Republican strategists note the pendulum could easily swing back in Trump’s direction before the election. “Three months ago we were all certain that this election was going to be about impeachment, and three months before that it was all going to be about the border wall,” says Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and co-author of The Great Revolt. But he sees signs of trouble in the polling of voters who dislike both candidates. In 2016, those voters picked Trump; in 2020, they favor Biden. “It is a warning sign” for Trump, Todd says.

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Time: Why a Forgotten KKK Raid on a Gay Club in Miami Still Matters 80 Years Later

Eighty years ago this month, on Nov. 15, 1937, a raid took place at La Paloma nightclub in an unincorporated part of Dade County (modern-day Miami-Dade County). Unlike at Stonewall, law enforcement was not behind this Miami-area raid. Instead, nearly two hundred women and men from the Ku Klux Klan—wearing long, white hooded robes that both concealed their identities and struck fear—burned a fiery cross on public property and inducted several dozen new members that night. They then stormed La Paloma, roughed up staff and performers, and ordered the nightspot closed. They had been trying to shut it down for some time. At La Paloma, women performed stripteases on stage. Performers then known as “female impersonators” entertained paying customers, and effeminate men (or “pansies”) made crude sexual jokes to the audience’s delight. Gender and sexual non-conforming people not only staffed the club, they also represented a part of its clientele. As one contemporary observer recalled, “Homosexuals in evening gowns, trousered lesbians, and prostitutes” were among those who forged community in spaces like La Paloma. [...]

In the end, these raids, and several that occurred before and after, proved ineffective in silencing queer voices and experiences. La Paloma, for example, soon reopened and, according to its manager, offered “spicier entertainment than ever.” One of the new skits rehearsed for its reopening was a satire of the Klan’s raid at its club, including performers wearing the white hooded robes.

Although wildly different, the reason the events at Stonewall and La Paloma share some general overlapping threads is that queer joints have historically been key sites of resistance, change and even revolution. There are dozens more examples of such raids: Turkish Baths (New York City, 1929), Cooper’s Donuts (Los Angeles, 1959), Gene Compton’s Cafeteria (San Francisco, 1966), and Black Cat (Los Angeles, 1967), among others.

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Time: Prominent Supporter of President Trump Admits He Regrets His Vote

"Those of us who supported Mr. Trump were never so naïve as to expect that he would transform himself into a model of presidential decorum upon taking office. But our calculation was that a few cringe-inducing tweets were an acceptable trade-off for a successful governing agenda," Krein wrote. "Yet after more than 200 days in office, Mr. Trump’s behavior grows only more reprehensible. Meanwhile, his administration has no significant legislative accomplishments — and no apparent plan to deliver any." [...]

Krein also criticized Trump's reaction to the violence at a white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va. Trump defended those associated with white supremacist groups and said "both sides" were to blame for the clashes that left one counter-protester dead. Trump's remarks earned praise from white supremacists, but were criticized by members of both parties. CEOs responded by withdrawing from Trump's advisory councils, and two charities canceled events that had been scheduled to take place at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club.

"It is now clear that we were deluding ourselves," Krein wrote. "Either Mr. Trump is genuinely sympathetic to the David Duke types, or he is so obtuse as to be utterly incapable of learning from his worst mistakes. Either way, he continues to prove his harshest critics right."

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Time: Russia Has Launched a Fake News War on Europe. Now Germany Is Fighting Back

Her concern is not just the Russian media outlets that spread disinformation, Hegelich says. It is also the automated algorithms, known as bots, that help false reports go viral much faster than politicians or fact-checkers can debunk them. When American voters were shown a series of such stories from the U.S. elections, about 15% reported seeing them during the race; 8% said they believed them, according to a study published this spring by Stanford University. In June, when researchers in Germany asked a similar set of questions, 59% of Germans reported seeing fake news online; 61% said that it poses a threat to democracy.

So Merkel’s government is preparing for a siege. Her coalition in parliament passed a law at the end of June that will impose fines worth upwards of $50 million on Facebook and other social media companies that do not promptly remove “illegal content,” a term that Merkel’s government has used to target everything from hate speech and pornography to malicious propaganda. “False news is a threat to our culture of debate,” the official behind the law, Justice Minister Heiko Maas, told the German weekly Welt am Sonntag in January. Two months later, when he presented a draft of the Network Enforcement Act to reporters in Berlin, Maas made clear that the government aimed to regulate social media with an unprecedented rigor. “There should be just as little tolerance for criminal rabble rousing on social networks as on the street,” he said. [...]

As part of their cooperation, Facebook has agreed to reach into the news feeds of its users and put a warning label next to the disputed posts. The idea is not to censor or delete the content but to make readers think twice about its sources while offering them a way to double check its claims. “We’re not the ones doing the fact checking,” says Allan. “The healthy ecosystem is one in which expert fact checkers are doing their job, and they can reach people through Facebook.” [...]

What makes News Front stand out from its allies is that it rarely even pretends to uphold traditional journalistic standards. Its website refers to the agency’s staff as “voluntary fighters of the information war,” whose mission is to “defend the interests of Russian civilization and to show the true face of the enemies of the Russian world.” Sputnik and RT, Russian outlets with overt funding from the state, try to act like professional media companies, presenting a Russian twist on world events usually without resorting to outright jingoism and fabrication. Their Crimean cousin, by contrast, acts more like a scrappy paramilitary unit, pushing the same goals and ideology more aggressively, free of direct links to the Kremlin. The site’s contributors in Europe often publish their work anonymously, providing a layer of protection from the authorities that Russia’s official outlets do not enjoy. The main stringer for News Front in Germany, for instance, uses online aliases, and Knyrik declines to provide his real name. “I worry about him and our other volunteers. They could be arrested,” he says, as though his reporters in Europe are soldiers behind enemy lines. [...]

The better approach, he says, might be introduce a fact-checking curriculum in schools and make students more aware of their sources of information. But that educational approach will take years to have an impact, and in the meantime fake news technology will continue to advance. In a study published in July, academics at the University of Washington created software to “synthesize” a video of Barack Obama delivering lines he had never actually spoken.

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Time: Vladimir Putin Doesn't Understand the Limits of Donald Trump's Power

President Vladimir Putin seems particularly out of sorts. By now he has realized that betting on Trump represents a mistake he has made before with Western leaders, and his decision on Sunday to expel hundreds of diplomats and other personnel from the U.S. embassy in Moscow shows that he’s ready to cut his losses. “There was nothing more to wait for,” his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in explaining the decision on Monday. “It was all pretty obvious.”

And Putin should have known better. His closest alliances with the West have all gone the same way. Whether it was Jacques Chirac in France, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, each was built on a personal rapport with an incoming head of state, always another man, usually also a blowhard. Each collapsed when that leader was confronted by the limitations of democracy: term limits, a free press, an independent legislature, an unhappy electorate, or any of the other checks and balances built into their constitutions. But with each new attempt at a friendship with the West, Putin seemed to hope that his counterparts could override these curbs on their authority the same way Putin has done in Russia.

They have always let him down, though none quite as spectacularly as President Trump. The U.S. Congress sent Trump a veto-proof bill on July 27 imposing new sanctions on Russia for its alleged interference in the U.S. presidential elections last year, not even a month after the two Presidents met for the first time during the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. To many in Moscow, the legislation proved Trump to be a feckless leader, unable to make good on his earnest promises to “get along” with Russia. “Since Trump cannot handle his own lawmakers, it means he is weak,” the Russian political analyst Alexei Makarkin wrote in an analysis of the sanctions bill. [...]

And that conviction is not likely to budge amid the latest lesson in American civics. On Russian state television channels, Trump’s failure to silence the media and force his agenda through Congress and the courts has simply been cast as further proof that the U.S. is run by some all-powerful cabal – only this time the cabal has turned on the U.S. President.

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Time: Judge: Gender Laws Are at Odds With Science

This physiological truth is unrelated to whether someone is straight, gay or transgender. Many individuals are born with sex chromosome, endocrine or hormonal irregularities, and their birth certificates are inaccurate because in the United States birth records are not designed to allow doctors to designate an ambiguous sex. Countless people likely have no idea that they fall into this group. The more we learn about our DNA, the more that biological sex — from the moment of conception — looks like an intricate continuum and less like two tidy boxes. This understanding makes it virtually impossible for judges to consistently apply a law that permits or prohibits conduct based on whether someone is a man or a woman. [...]

I was curious whether her situation was an obscure medical anomaly that was statistically and legally irrelevant. It wasn’t. A regularly cited 1991 study of nearly 35,000 newborn children found that 1 in 426 did not have strictly XX or XY chromosomes. In addition, the World Health Organization reports that 1 in every 2,000 births worldwide are visibly intersex, because the child’s genitals are either incomplete or ambiguous, which equates to five newborn Americans a day. This represents a sizable U.S. population that cannot be ignored by the law. [...]

The United States’ stringent adherence to a two-sex paradigm is inconsistent with science and incongruous with the historic and modern understanding of sex throughout many regions of the world. Dating back to 2000 B.C., three or more sexes can be found in classical Greek, Sanskrit and Hindu texts. Currently, numerous countries recognize a third or indeterminate sex including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Nepal and New Zealand. If the bill introduced into the California state legislature in January 2017 passes, California will be the first state in the U.S. to recognize a third, non-binary gender, for birth certificates and driver’s licenses.

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Time: Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2016 Is ‘Post-Truth’

Oxford Dictionaries kicked off “word of the year” season by anointing their pick on Tuesday: post-truth.

The word, selected by Oxford’s editors, does not need to be coined in the past year but it does have to capture the English-speaking public’s mood and preoccupations. And that makes this one an apt choice for countries like America and Britain, where people lived through divisive, populist upheavals that often seemed to prize passion above all else—including facts.

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Time: This Map Shows How America Voted in Every Election Since 1824

The U.S. wasn’t always divided between blue and red states—the parties that dominated the national conversation once included Whig, National Republican, Democratic-Republican and more.

Electoral maps dating back decades reveal a lot about political change in the U.S. as the country grew and two dominant political parties emerged.

For some presidents, elections ended in landslide wins. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1936 election with 523 electoral votes, while his opponent Alfred M. Landon received 8. Decades later, the country turned almost entirely red, when incumbent Republican candidate Ronald Reagan carried 49 of the 50 states, with 525 electoral votes. He was the second candidate to do so, following Richard Nixon, who took 520 electoral votes in the 1972 election.

Check out election results going back nearly 200 years in the interactive below.

Time: U.S. Support for the War in Yemen Is Indefensible

The humanitarian impact of the bombing campaign is staggering—no civilian is left unaffected. Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East before the start of this conflict, is now on the brink of starvation. The numbers do not sufficiently represent the desperation that this conflict has wrought, but they’re a start. More than 19 million people do not have access to clean water, 14 million people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, and more than 3 million Yemenis have been driven from their homes. [...]

We live in a world where the rules of war are continually flouted and the U.S.-supported Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is no exception. In the more than 3,000 strikes since the conflict began, civilian sites are routinely in the line of fire. Hospitals, schools, factories, homes, markets—there is no safe space in Yemen today. And with Saudi Arabia’s purchase of more than $115 billion in U.S.-manufactured military equipment approved since the war in Yemen began—including air-to-ground munitions as well as tanks—the jeopardy civilians are facing is marked with a deep American imprint.

Newly disclosed government documents reveal that State Department lawyers warned that the U.S. could be implicated in war crimes for supporting a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen.

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Time: The Enduring Lessons of the Battle of Cable Street, 80 Years On

The successful defeat of Nazi sympathizer Oswald Mosley’s march through the East End, known as the Battle of Cable Street, is being commemorated this year by marches, talks and other events in this corner of London. The anniversary is being recognized at a timely moment, after Britain has endured a summer of increased hate crime reports following the EU referendum in Britain, and charges of an anti-Semitism problem in the opposition Labour Party. Coming also as far-right parties are gaining in electoral successes across Europe, it’s a good time to re-examine the forces behind the Battle of Cable Street. [...]

On Sunday Oct. 4, 1936, Mosley led his Blackshirt supporters on a march through the East End, following months of BUF meetings and leafleting in the area designed to intimidate Jewish people and break up the East End’s community solidarity. Despite a petition signed by 100,000 people, the British government permitted the march to go ahead and designated 7,000 members of the police force to accompany it. The counter-protest from the Cable Street community involved members from the Jewish and Irish communities, local workers and local Labor and Communist parties, who succeeded in disbanding the BUF march. As TIME reported in the magazine’s Oct. 12 issue 1936, in an article called “Mosley Shall Not Pass!” [...]

The battle took place when fascism seemed to be on the rise in other European cities, led by Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. “The fact that so many different communities came together and resulted in such huge numbers turning out against countervailing pressures tells us something”, Rosenberg says. “It was a victory for the united people of the East End.” It was also an awakening for some in the British left, says London School of Economics research fellow Richard Baxell, only months after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. “For some people that were involved in the protest, Cable Street was the road to Spain, and many would go on to volunteer as soldiers for the Republicans there”, he says.

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Time: How Indiana’s Religious Freedom Law Is Being Used to Defend Child Abuse and Other Crimes

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act—signed into law in 2015 by Republican Gov. Mike Pence—was initially viewed by some as a counterweight to the legalization of same-sex marriage across the U.S. because it would’ve allowed businesses in the state to deny goods and services to same-sex couples based on employees’ religious objections. That is no longer an issue since the law was amended to bar discriminatory behavior—but the act has since taken on an unexpected new life: as a defense for criminal conduct like child abuse and drug use. So far, at least four people in Indiana have used the law to argue that their religion excuses them from actions that would otherwise be considered crimes—and legal experts expect more cases to follow. [...]

“Ms. Thaing believed in the teachers of the Bible that state, ‘Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol,’” a Hebrew word loosely translated as hell, Bowes said in court documents. [...]

Curry says his office has seen three cases involving the RFRA as a defense, including one challenging Indiana’s marijuana law by the First Church of Cannabis, which argues that its church members—”Cannaterians”—should be able to smoke marijuana as a religious sacrament. Indianapolis police have told churchgoers that they would be arrested if they did so. The lawsuit is pending. An additional case involving Curry’s office includes an Indiana resident who is arguing that his religious beliefs compel him to avoid paying income taxes.

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Time: Re-Discovering the Italian Kingdom of Two Sicilies

This myth is particularly important to the Independent Neapolitan Nation and a wider group of southern Italians called Neo-Bourbons. Part cultural heritage organization, part secessionist movement, the devout members believe the 1860 unification of Italy was wrong and wish to restore the former Kingdom of Two Sicilies and crown the rightful heir of the House of Bourbons. [...]

The north-led unification left some feeling liberated, especially the wealthy landowning elite while others felt conquered and excluded. Ninety percent of the south didn’t even speak Italian at the time when Turin was named the new nation’s capital city. “Naples had been a capital of a kingdom for hundreds of years,” says Dr. Enrico Dal Lago, a National University of Ireland lecturer who researches links between American and Italian history. “That was a strong regional culture that simply vanished into thin air and became incorporated into this Kingdom of Italy overnight.”

Coincidently, America’s Civil War raged at the same time, and to some, distinctly mirrored the Italian conflict: an unjust northern power smothering an independent southern nation and its way of life. Some southern Italians looked to the American Confederates as brothers in arms, feeling slighted by the north for various reasons. In 2015, the south was half as wealthy in terms of GDP with twice as high unemployment according to The Economist. Only 65% of households have access to broadband internet, 10% less than in the north. But nowhere has the symbolic disconnect between north and south been so visible as the Salerno Reggio Calabria Highway. The highway has been under construction since the 1960s and should connect the southwestern coast of the Italian peninsula with the rest of Italy and Europe. North Italy’s section of this highway was completed half a century ago.

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Time: The Other Side: Life as a Syrian Refugee in Germany

As both photographer and subject, Kasem traveled as a refugee from his home in Damascus to Europe in the summer of 2015. He arrived in Germany after going overland to Turkey and crossing to Greece by boat. Once in Bavaria, in southern Germany, he was assigned to the refugee camp at the Balthasar-Neumann-Kaserne military base in Würzburg, where most of the pictures from this series were taken.

The photo diary – which he calls A Small Forest on the Other Side – helped Kasem come to terms with the reality of his new life in Europe.

An estimated 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011. The majority have sought refuge in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, while 6.6 million are displaced within Syria itself, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Just over one million have requested asylum within Europe. Germany, with more than 300,000 cumulated applications, and Sweden, with 100,000, are the E.U.’s top receiving countries. [...]

“You change your country, you go through a weird journey and then you are stuck in a weird place,” says Kasem. “You cannot really interact with the German people. It’s not closed, you can go out, but you feel somehow that you’re treated like a different thing. But after you are out of the camp, it’s normal. Those feelings start to fade away.”

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Time: What West Germany Got Wrong About the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

In the summer of 1982, while he was still opposition leader in Bonn, future German chancellor Helmut Kohl expressed his concerns about the plans for a national Holocaust museum in the United States. Peter Petersen, a CDU member of the Bundestag, recorded what Kohl had said to a group of Bundestag parliamentarians about the museum, which “the Jews,” as Petersen put it, were building in Washington. In the early 1980s, he summarized Kohl’s statement: “What would a young German visiting the United States think when he passed the Holocaust Museum on the Mall? . . . What would he feel when he saw his country’s entire history reduced to these twelve terrible years? Was this the way in which the United States was going to treat its most valued European ally?”

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates in private organizations and foundations, with Kohl located at its center, perceived themselves as the victims of the afterlife of the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public manifestations of Holocaust memory—for example museums, monuments, and movies—could severely damage the Federal Republic’s reputation in the United States. [...]

Through a series of behind-the-scenes interventions, a network of official and unofficial German emissaries attempted to integrate the history of German anti-Nazi resistance and of postwar West Germany into the exhibition concept. They aimed to show that not all Germans had been Nazis and that the Federal Republic had learned its lessons. For instance, they considered the country’s coping with the Nazi past, its model democracy and the alliance with Israel a success story, which should be told in the museum. For more than a decade, German intermediaries tried to convince the museum planners to design the exhibition accordingly, arguing that the museum would be incomplete without references to the “good Germans” that lived and suffered through the Third Reich as well as postwar West Germany’s accomplishments. As claimed in interviews and oral history transcripts with former museum representatives Michael Berenbaum, Miles Lerman, and William Lowenberg, they also offered a very large donation—up to $50 million—to make an even more convincing case in Washington.

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Time: Pro-Choice Catholics Are Praying SCOTUS Will Protect Abortion Rights

But these laws have made it much harder for poor women, women of color and residents of rural areas to get access to abortions. Women who need these services often face more hurdles when seeking a timely appointment with one of the few clinics left open in their state. With clinic closures come longer driving distances, which require reliable transportation and money for gas or fares. In states with waiting periods, patients must make multiple trips to the clinic, often over several days, before they are able to get the care they seek. These burdens are onerous enough before factoring in the need to take time off work and find dependable childcare. With the clock ticking from the moment a woman discovers she is pregnant until the day she can no longer obtain a first trimester abortion, each delay can be stressful. [...]

I am far from the only one. Only 10% of U.S. Catholics agree with the Vatican’s position that abortion should be illegal in every case, and Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as other women: according to a 2010 Guttmacher survey, 28% of women who had an abortion self-identified as Catholic, compared to the 27% of all women of reproductive age who have had an abortion. Catholic bishops who collude with anti-abortion groups to promote these restrictive laws are betraying their own flock and leaving poor women—Catholic and non-Catholic alike—floundering in a stormy and inhospitable sea.

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Time: What History Teaches Us About Demagogues Like The Donald

In fact, the identification of a “demagogue” turns out, as often as not, to be an act of demagoguery itself, with those occupying each end of the political spectrum leveling the term against leaders springing from, or appealing to, the other side.

I would suggest that there remains one simple test that will allow voters to identify a demagogue: If the would-be leader promises to give, restore, provide, insure, or enhance a country but never asks the citizens to sacrifice, pay, serve, or simply work, then this leader is a potential demagogue. [...]

Democracy suffers from an inescapable, built-in flaw. Each citizen gets an equal, but tiny, share of political power. An individual voter’s ballot makes a difference only if she breaks a tie. But the probability she’ll break a tie, in most cases, is vanishingly small. Thus, most voters have no incentive to be well-informed about politics, or to correct their misinformed opinions. They have no incentive to think rationally about politics or to process information in a reasonable way. They have every incentive to indulge their biases and prejudices.

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Time: Former Intel. Official: American Hate Is a Bigger Threat Than Foreign Terrorism

The tragedy in Orlando will undoubtedly divide our nation even further, as the loudest voices shout their political opinions about gun control, immigration and Islamic radicalism, pitting Americans against each other and further exploiting our anger and fear. As American society sinks further and further into this angry, polarized society, I fear not for the economic collapse of our country, nor for defeat at the hands of terrorists or enemies. I fear for the implosion of our country at the hands of our own citizens, who have become so embittered, and so divided, that they hate their neighbors more than they love their nation. [...]

And yet, I shudder at the idea of discussing the second amendment, abortion, LGBT rights, the role of the federal government, Barack Obama, race or religion with Americans who don’t share my views. I would rather sit across from a sworn enemy of the United States and talk about the history of our foreign policy than discuss a woman’s right to choose with a steadfast anti-abortion rights advocate next door. [...]

The tech industry, in particular, could play a pivotal role. And imagine if movies started showing more diversity of political, religious and social viewpoints in characters that also manage to get along. What if reality TV shows introduced us to a wider variety of our fellow Americans and brought people together to discuss true hot-button issues, without throwing things at each other? What if public universities encouraged all viewpoints, instead of creating “safe spaces”?

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Time: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Socialism in America

This promising beginning, however, abruptly came to an end. Socialist Party criticism of World War I led to a ferocious government crackdown on the party, including raids on its offices, censorship of its newspapers, and imprisonment of its leaders, including Debs. In addition, when Bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in Russia and established the Soviet Union, they denounced democratic socialist parties and established rival Communist parties under Soviet control to spark revolutions. In the United States, the Socialists fiercely rejected this Communist model. But the advent of Communism sharply divided the American Left and, worse yet, confused many Americans about the differences between Socialists and Communists. Although the Socialist Party lingered on during the 1920s and 1930s, many individual Socialists simply moved into the Democratic Party, particularly after its New Deal programs began to steal the Socialist thunder. [...]

And, then, remarkably, democratic socialism began to revive. Of course, it had never entirely disappeared, and occasional polls found small-scale support for it. But, in December 2011, a startling 31 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that they had a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” with young people, Blacks, and Hispanics showing the greatest enthusiasm. In November 2012, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent of Americans had a positive reaction to “socialism,” including 53 percent of Democrats.

Why the rising tide of support for socialism in recent years? One key factor was certainly a popular backlash against the growing economic instability and inequality in America fostered by brazen corporate greed, exploitation, and control of public policy. In addition, college-educated young people―saddled with enormous tuition debt, often under-employed, and with little recollection of the Soviet nightmare―began to discover the great untold political story of the postwar years, the remarkable success of European social democracy.

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Time: Mikhail Gorbachev: Putin Is an Obstacle to Progress

The present Russian regime need have no delusions that conservatism is a panacea for our problems, lulling themselves with the belief that for the sake of peace and quiet people will agree to put up with stagnation. They are wrong. I am increasingly convinced that all they are doing is playing for time, clinging to power for its own sake, clutching at the benefits a minority extract from the current state of affairs.

People are not blind and their patience is not limitless. They have demonstrated in protest on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Prospekt, demanding change. If there is none, the protests will not just be repeated but will become more radical. That is dangerous and must be avoided. Russia really does not need more turmoil, she needs change, change that opens the way to a genuine renewal of society and improvement in people’s lives. [...]

Another five or six years of this and Russia is unlikely ever to be able to escape from this dead-end situation.

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