A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump: the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, and the Democratic Party. Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches.

Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the UN reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.

The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence.

The end of Soviet Ukraine and the collapse of Soviet ideology created an identity vacuum. As Yasha Levine explains, the only alternative identity that was organized enough and developed enough to offer a solution in the midst of post-Soviet identity confusion and crisis was one that was developed by Ukrainian nationalists.

The endemic trauma in American society, which is getting worse under the onslaught of the gig economy, pronounced social inequality, the climate crisis and the seizure of the political process and most institutions by corporations and the ruling oligarchs, is our most serious public health crisis. It has grave individual, social and political consequences.

There is a long history of antagonism between the words and actions of fascist politicians, both those of our time and of the 20th century. Although Poilievre is not a fascist himself, his rhetoric remains closely aligned with the fascistic tradition of appealing to working class sensibilities while starkly opposing policies in line with proletarian interests.

In his latest column, Boris Kagarlitsky casts his critical eye on the forces of right-wing populism in Russia today and its leading figures Igor Strelkov and Yevgeny Prigozhin. They may rail against corrupt elites, Kagarlitsky explains, but the change they seek is superficial, a mere changing of the guard; above all they fear the social transformation to which disorder is liable to give rise.

The attacks on Belgorod provide some tactical advantages to Ukraine. On the other hand, they enable the Russian authorities to paint Ukraine as a “terrorist state” and strengthen Moscow’s propaganda narrative that Kyiv is in league with neo-Nazis. Rather than weakening support in Russia for the war, these attacks may therefore have the opposite effect.

We often hear the refrain that Israeli politics is very complicated. It’s usually used as an excuse to stop conversation dead. But given the current turmoil among Israel’s Jewish population, it’s imperative to try to step back and simplify. The crisis now roiling the country is a dramatic moment in an ongoing and epoch-making demographic and political shift.

Our society is deeply diseased. We must heal these social illnesses. We must mitigate this anomie. We must restore the severed social bonds and integrate the dispossessed back into society. If these social bonds remain ruptured it will guarantee a frightening neofascism. There are very dark forces circling around us. Sooner than we expect, they may have us in their grip.