The US woman killed in a shooting at a San Diego County synagogue was named late Saturday as Lori Gilbert-Kaye, a 60-year-old mother… Her friend Audrey Jacobs, a community activist, said Gilnert-Kaye had jumped in front of Rabbi Mendel Goldstein — Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein’s son — “to take the bullet and save his life.”

The 19-year-old suspect, identified as John T. Earnest, of Rancho Penasquitos, was arrested a short time later… Earnest appears to have written a letter posted on the Internet filled with anti-Semitic screeds. In the letter, he also talked about planning the attack.

Steve Vaus, the mayor of Poway, told reporters that “it was a hate crime, and that will not stand,” without elaborating further. But as with other recent shootings, hateful online forums appear to be a breeding ground for inspiring acts of violence. “Once again, a young white male has apparently been influenced by dangerous online white supremacist propaganda. And once again, we see how this propaganda can lead to terrorist acts,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said in a statement.

This trend can be reversed, but four more years of a rightist-religious government in Israel, which will eliminate any chance of compromise with the Palestinians and bring Israel closer to becoming an Orthodox halakhic state, is expected to exacerbate relations even further. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington has relied over the years on bipartisan support. This era is apparently over. Netanyahu has Trump; Israel has no future in the party currently supported by most of the young people in America.

We’re all entitled to our opinions about the outcomes of elections. But this revulsion on the part of Democrats for the democratically expressed will of the Israeli people is likely to widen the divisions in their party about attitudes regarding the Jewish state. Even more troubling is that it increases the likelihood that support for Israel will be an issue in the 2020 presidential election.

The survey also accentuated an important fact: Democratic voters critical of Israel are more than capable of grasping nuance, balancing positive views of Israelis with reproachful attitudes toward their leaders — just like Sanders, Klobuchar and Warren. What this means is that those speaking of a “Corbynization” of the Democratic Party are either prematurely panicking or engaging in wishful thinking.

Biden is more than able to identify America’s structural problems, but his failure to recognize his own part in upholding them proves he is unable — and unwilling — to fight them. His treatment of Hill is not an outlier; it is representative.

It’s possible that he doesn’t feel remorse, or that the famously gaffe-prone candidate just hasn’t found the right words. But there’s also another possible explanation: Biden is running as an old-school Democrat who rejects contemporary leftism. If he apologizes to Hill or the women who say he touched them inappropriately, he could risk losing his credibility with the voters he increasingly seems to see as his base — liberals who miss the old days of the Democratic Party and are suspicious of newer movements like #MeToo.

What precisely is Biden supposed to have done that he didn’t do? He allowed her to testify right before Thomas was scheduled for a vote. He then ended up voting against Thomas’ confirmation. Yes, Republicans on the committee aggressively cross-examined Hill on the bizarre details of her claims — for example, why did she remain under Thomas’ employ for so long? — but that’s how a hearing works.

The Constitution is clear: the census should be as accurate as possible by counting every “person.” Or, as put by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in arguments before the court: “Enumeration is how many people reside here…Not how many are citizens.” Severe impacts can result from an inaccurate census count. California, Texas, Illinois, Florida and New York could lose Congressional seats. Fewer roads would be built in some states. School lunches would be cut back where there are many foreign born. Millions of people could suffer.

The citizenship question is likely to make the census less accurate, to put it mildly. In the face of the harsh anti-immigrant policies sponsored by the Trump administration, as well as uncertainty about their own status, immigrants may not want to reveal their legal status to the government… this is an almost subtle way to rig the architecture of democracy, comparatively speaking.

That leading Democrats are now seriously opposed to the Census inquiring into citizenship, and at the same time favor giving felons the right to vote, is a sign of how far we have fallen from the idea that voting in our elections is one of the most sacred privileges Americans enjoy. Only citizens can vote, and that’s what’s behind the Supreme Court case. At issue there is whether the Census form can ask whether a person is a citizen.

From the growing left to the steaming fringes of the far right, the problem is apparently the same. What binds together this rogue’s gallery of radicals is a common methodology: a rabid focus on people’s “identity” – their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship or background. Coalitions are thus built, and demands crystallised, around shared understandings of what it is to be, say, a cis gay person in the UK, or, if you’d rather, an embattled white man in a clash of civilisations.

Traditionally, identity has only really been a question for non-dominant groups in society. If you’re a member of the dominant group, your identity is taken for granted precisely because it’s not threatened. But the combination of demographic shifts and demagogic politicians has transformed the landscape of American politics. Now, white identity has been fully activated.

The most straightforward answer to the Left’s unrelenting charge that the president is fanning white nationalism is that there is a difference between not observing the rules of political correctness and being racist. The president is no racist, he just doesn’t play by the rules, and thinking people ought to be able to distinguish the two… As much as Republicans claim to detest identity politics, they bend to it. In the end, the only person who turned out to be the true enemy of identity politics was Trump.

To be clear, the Navy isn’t endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied — rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.

In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

“It’s very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed,” he said, calling it a “truly radical technology.”

Yet even as the Navy indicates it’s willing to discuss the taboo topic, it’s also shying away from three notorious little letters. UFO carries an airport’s worth of baggage, bursting with urban legends, government secrecy, and over-the-top Hollywood movies. The statements and quotes that the Navy provided to news outlets are devoid of any reference to UFOs. Instead, they’re called “unexplained aerial phenomena,” “unidentified aircraft,” “unauthorized aircraft,” and, perhaps most intriguing, “suspected incursions.”