Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker:
The spectacular violence in the Capitol on January 6th was the outcome of Donald Trump’s yearslong dalliance with the white-supremacist right. Trump all but promised an attack of some kind as he called for his followers to descend on Washington, D.C., for a “wild” protest to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. In a speech inciting his supporters to lay siege to the Capitol, he told them, “We will never give up. We will never concede.” He encouraged them to “fight like hell,” saying that otherwise they would lose their country, and dispatched them to the Capitol. He promised that he would be with them. But, like a lazy coward, Trump went home to watch the show on TV.
The white right-wing assault on the Capitol, with a Confederate flag in the building and gallows on the lawn, was alarming yet wholly predictable as Trump’s frantic efforts to hold on to power faltered. Not only did Trump clearly incite violence with his speech, but his Administration also paved the way for the violence through its deliberate neglect of the rising threat of white extremism. The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that attacks by far-right perpetrators more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2017. Yet even as the threat of white-supremacist violence grew, it commanded little interest or acknowledgment from the Trump Administration. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, which was restructured and renamed in 2019, is dedicated to investigating extremism and domestic terrorism. Between 2017 and 2019, its operating budget was cut from twenty-one million dollars to less than three million, and the number of its full-time employees dwindled from forty to fewer than ten.
Instead of investigating white supremacists, the Trump Administration has surveilled the Black Lives Matter movement and other minority activists.
More here.
Often it seems a shame that those in opposing camps do not take time to stop and appreciate what they have in common: their certainty.
The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you’re probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I’m not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I’m using them as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion of how democracy is supposed to work and how we can make it better. We’ve talked about related topics recently with 
American foreign policy tends to oscillate between inward and outward orientations. President George W. Bush was an interventionist; his successor, Barack Obama, less so. And Donald Trump was mostly non-interventionist. What should we expect from Joe Biden?
In what would tragically turn out to be the last years of his life, Camus returned imaginatively to the landscape of his youth—a landscape that, because of the Algerian War, was not accessible to him in the way it once had been. In 1958, he agreed to a French edition of The Wrong Side and the Right Side, republished by Gallimard. The timing was significant. “I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun,” Camus wrote in his preface to the new edition. It was an odd claim for a writer who had just been given the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Camus was more troubled by the award than he was honored by it. Pained by the war in his native Algeria, shunned by Parisian intellectuals for his critique of the revolutionary Left, he feared he was finished as a writer—a fear that the Nobel Prize, which usually honors work done over a long career, only served to heighten. Refusing an interview with the newspaper L’Express, Camus explained that he wanted the noise and publicity surrounding the award to die away quickly. “I want to disappear for a while,” he said. To his friend Roger Quinox, he seemed “like someone buried alive.”
The authors of this book paint a detailed and dispassionate yet wrenching picture of the painful and bloody transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in the period following the white leader Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. Their main gift to historians is the wealth of information they provide, much of it hitherto unknown outside secret service circles, about how Rhodesia’s Special Branch, of which the authors themselves were two of the wiliest spooks, helped to keep the forces of African liberation at bay for so long.
Asia has a high number of 
The reign of King Louis Philippe, the last king of France, came to an abrupt and ignominious end on Feb. 24, 1848, after days of increasingly violent demonstrations in Paris and months of mounting agitation with the government’s policies. The protesters surging through the city at first were fairly orderly: students chanting, well-dressed men and women strolling, troublemakers breaking windows and looting. But late in the evening of Feb. 23, the tide turned dark. Soldiers had fired on the crowd near the Hôtel des Capucines, leaving scores of men and women gravely wounded. Some blocks away, a journalist was “startled by the aspect of a gentleman who, without his hat, ran madly into the middle of the street, and began to harangue the passers-by. ‘To arms!’ he cried. ‘We are betrayed.’”
During the 1650s, the admired Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens often found himself with time on his hands. He was the loyal secretary to successive princes in the House of Orange, the ruling dynasty in the northern Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, and had been knighted by both 
The storming of the US Capitol on January 6 is easily misunderstood. Shaken by the ordeal, members of Congress have issued statements explaining that America is a nation of laws, not mobs. The implication is that the disruption incited by President Donald Trump is something new. It is not. The United States has a long history of mob violence stoked by white politicians in the service of rich white Americans. What was unusual this time is that the white mob turned on the white politicians, rather than the people of color who are usually the victims.
He calls himself a fermentation revivalist. With several award-winning books on the subject and a very large following on YouTube, Sandor Ellix Katz is part fermentation expert and part fermentation superstar. But I wondered: why revivalist? Did fermentation ever go out of fashion? Where I spent my adult life ‑ in Japan ‑ fermentation has always stood centre-stage. From soy sauce to miso and from sake to tsukemono, it is hard to imagine Japanese food without it.
It was, in all respects, another typical Covid evening. We’d finished our regulation bottle of Chianti, yet again postponed our online Italian lesson, and decided that not one of the films on television merited a moment of our time. Three vacant hours lay between us and bedtime.