It can be easy to forget how new our political and culture-war conflicts are. Ten years ago, critical race theory was something you'd encounter only online or in academic settings, Democratic politicians were still talking about civil unions for homosexual couples, and the media and federal government were busy pointing out how far America had come in repairing the broken race relations of the past. Today, little remains of that old order. Just how fast has this transformation unfolded? Consider a simple measure of how frequently the word "racism" appears in the nation's four largest newspapers: after staying basically constant from the 1970s to 2010, its usage explodes around 2012, with the Washington Post and the New York Times leading the charge.

Though this "Great Awokening" has scrambled political coalitions and upended widely held truths, wokeness itself remains a muddled concept. The obvious definition — that it is a belief system, what writer Wesley Yang has dubbed "the successor ideology" — has considerable merit. (See "The Identity Cult," Winter 2022.) But as American polarization increases, it becomes clear that wokeness is also a social, economic, legal, and political phenomenon; it cannot simply be reduced to the ideas inside people's heads. (See "The Genealogy of Woke Capital," Autumn 2021.)


If wokeness is an institutional force, a comparative analysis can help describe it. Most Europeans can remember when America was considered stodgy and conservative, compared with progressive Western Europe. And yet, in 2022, the U.S. is experiencing deeper levels of polarization and social strife than other Western countries. Polls suggest a rapid loss of faith in public institutions. Americans identifying with either political party increasingly see the other party as a threat to democracy itself.

The movement by residents of Eastern Oregon to secede from the state and join Idaho has taken a step further after a Republican state senator introduced a bill that would allow 11 counties to join their neighboring state.

State Senator Dennis Linthicum introduced Senate Joint Memorial 2 on January 10, also known as the 'Greater Idaho' bill.

'Eastern Oregon is culturally, politically, economically much more similar to Idaho than it is to western Oregon,' said Matt McCaw, a spokesman for the Greater Idaho Movement.

'Our movement is about self-determination and matching people to government that they want and that matches their values. In Oregon, we've had this urban-rural divide for a very long time.'

Last year, Brian Lande, an officer in the Richmond, Calif., police department, had to draw his gun to stop two drunk men from clobbering each other to death with metal rods.

In 2015, he threatened deadly force to stop a fight between two more drunk men. One was armed with a hatchet. Another, with a wrench.

On another occasion, he drew his firearm to arrest a man hopping a backyard fence, fleeing the scene of a burglary.

None of these was remarkable in Richmond, a working-class city just east of San Francisco that's notorious for its drive-by shootings, break-ins, carjackings, and countless petty crimes.

When I asked Lande if he often had to unholster his gun — a standard-issue Glock 17 — he told me he'd done it so many times that "they all bleed into each other."

Luckily, he's never had to pull the trigger.

States, balking at storage costs, beg the federal government to take back the unwanted oversupply...

From Welt:

Authorities have come up with a term that sounds at least halfway sane. They're calling it "thermal reprocessing." Four federal states now claim to have thermally reprocessed - or, in plain language, to have incinerated - a total of 17.25 million expired Corona masks.

Baden-Württemberg has destroyed 6.1 million masks, Saxony 5.5 million, North Rhine-Westphalia 5 million, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 656,000 ...

The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) in Berlin has also "thermally recycled" masks in recent months. The number so far is "less than one million units," a spokesperson said ... The destroyed masks were purchased during the peak of the pandemic, and have exceeded their expiration date ...

The federal and state governments are currently standing atop a billion-dollar mountain of masks. According to information provided by the Ministry of Health in September, there are a total of 3.7 billion masks in the federal inventory ... The federal states have have an additional 180 million Corona masks at their disposal ...

The states want to burn even more masks, but for the moment they're not allowed, because much of the surplus in their possession is technically federal property.

"Theory" doesn't mean what you think it means

The World Economic Forum, governments around the world, and the mainstream news media are sounding the alarm in Davos about crazy-sounding, right-wing conspiracy theories. And it's easy to see why: conspiracy theories are prima facie silly. The boring truth is that people and institutions are terrible at keeping secrets.

And yet, a shocking number of crazy-sounding right-wing conspiracy theories have, recently, turned out to be true:

• The World Economic Forum really does exercise a creepy influence over world leaders and it really does want "A Great Reset" whereby we'll collectively move to living in low-energy, high-density, and low-privacy environments, having less physical wealth and, yes, eating insects for protein instead of meat.
• The FBI really did spy on Donald Trump's campaign, run brief-and-leak operations, and spread misinformation about the extent of Russian election interference in ways that led nearly all of the media, media platforms, and Democrats to believe that Hunter Biden's laptop was fake and anyone who talked about it is a conspiracy theorist, and in a way that may have constituted election interference.
• Facebook and Twitter really did censor accurate covid information at the behest of the White House and Twitter, and operate secret blacklists to censor and deplatform disfavored voices and opinions, even when their own internal teams said the people being censored had not actually broken any of the platform's rules.

Arizona law requires the county recorder to show the origins of and chain-of-custody documents for every drop box ballot obtained.

While the GOP and conservative media have largely moved on from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and the systemic failures that occurred in Maricopa County on Nov. 8, court testimony and eyewitness reports from the Lake trial include allegations that Arizona's largest county violated state law by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation for Election Day ballots, resulting in a mysterious 25,000 extra votes added to Maricopa County's official tally within a 24-hour period — more than the margin of victory between Lake and gubernatorial victor Katie Hobbs.

It was about 10:00 on election night when Maricopa County's ballot tabulation vendor, Runbeck Election Services, received its first truckload of Election Day drop box ballots. While Runbeck received seven truckloads total (the last was completed about 5 a.m. the following morning), Runbeck staff thought it odd the deliveries did not come earlier throughout the day. But that wasn't the only glitch. There were no chain-of-custody forms delivered with the ballots, a stark departure from typical procedure.

Authorities in southern Germany say efforts to put out a fire on a train turned into a spectacular chase early Friday after the driverless diesel engine began taking off toward Austria of its own accord.

Firefighters had been called to put out a train blaze near the village of Strass at about 3 a.m. (0200 GMT), the Bavarian Red Cross said. But shortly before they arrived the engine started moving downhill on the sloping track, picking up speed as it rolled several kilometers (miles) toward the town of Freilassing.

A video posted online by the Freilassing Volunteer Firefighting Company showed flames and smoke pouring from the train as it swept through the town.

With firefighters in hot pursuit, railway officials managed to switch the "ghost train" onto a side track near Freilassing station where it was stopped by a buffer before it could cross the border. The fire was extinguished and nobody was injured, the Bavarian Red Cross said in a statement.

Parents and conservatives in Scotland are outraged after the city council of Aberdeen launched what has been branded a "disgraceful" survey in 59 schools that asks pupils about their gender identity. The council is run by a coalition of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Liberal Democrats.

According to the Scottish Daily Mail, the survey, which is purported to be part of a sex and wellbeing study, asks schoolchildren to identify as "male, female, non-binary, transgender or other" and requires students to tick an answer before being allowed to proceed to the next page.

Critics of the survey have called it a blatant attempt to "indoctrinate" young children who do not know "if they want chicken nuggets or fish fingers for dinner."

To take up a matter that's been making me feel tired and irritable for two days, 'Sam Harris'. Other people have written about this, and I was hoping to talk myself into skipping it. But it can't be skipped.

Harris, a UCLA neuroscience PhD and (most famously) a critic of religious faith as an assault on rational thought, spent 2021 and 2022 attacking critics of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA products, like the biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Listen to one of those attacks here. Now, finding his views wrong, he finds his views to be correct:

"Had Covid been worse, you know, just enough worse to really get our attention, to really be undeniable, we would have had a different political conversation around it."

If enormous numbers of children had died — "if kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from Covid" — and if the vaccines had been extraordinarily effective, then anti-vaxxer sentiment wouldn't have been tolerated, and critics of the vaccines would not now be viewed as people who got the question right, and people like Sam Harris who were vicious critics of vaccine skeptics in 2021 and beyond would be vindicated and celebrated.

If all of reality had been completely different, Sam Harris would not have been wrong, so Sam Harris is therefore not wrong.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 's administration has blocked the inclusion of an Advanced Placement class centered on African American Studies in high schools .

The Washington Examiner obtained a letter from the Florida Department of Education's Office of Articulation to the College Board stating that the course is "inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value." The letter did not elaborate on what particular parts of the course content they found to be questionable.

Florida Education Department Press Secretary Cassie Palelis, in a statement to the Washington Examiner, said:

"If the course comes into compliance and incorporates historically accurate content, the Department will reopen the discussion."

This is a significant win for DeSantis, who had several portions of his Stop WOKE Act that would restrict critical race theory instruction in public university classrooms scrapped. Judge Mark Walker, who struck it down, compared the legislation to George Orwell's authoritarian dystopian novel,1984.